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Spanish police arrest leader of ETA's political wing

Spanish police arrested the leader of the political wing of the violent Basque separatist group ETA on Friday, signaling a new government crackdown after the group renounced a 15-month ceasefire earlier this week.

The police detained Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the outlawed political party Batasuna, in the northern coastal town of San Sebastian, an official from the National Court said.

Otegi was convicted last year of making comments in support of terrorism but was allowed to remain free while he was appealing the case.

His arrest is the latest in a series of moves that the Spanish and French authorities have taken against Basque separatists since Tuesday, when ETA formally ended its ceasefire. In practice, it was broken last December when ETA planted a car bomb at a Madrid airport, which killed two men and ended an attempt by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government to broker a peace deal, despite calls from ETA to maintain the truce.

Zapatero, a Socialist who has been accused of being soft on ETA by his conservative opposition and by some allies, pledged on Tuesday to clamp down on the group and its support network.

In an interview on Spanish television on Thursday, he denied that the government had eased up on ETA and said 92 members of the group had been arrested since the ceasefire began in March last year.

Pernando Barrena, a Batasuna spokesman, described Otegi's arrest as "an extremely serious move" and said at a news conference in San Sebastian that this week's measures against Basque separatists were "an invitation to repression and dark days."

On Wednesday, the government ordered Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos, an ETA member convicted of 25 killings, back to prison after he had recovered from a 114-day hunger strike.

In March, the government said it might let him serve his sentence at home because of health reasons, which drew anger from across the political spectrum and prompted hundreds of thousands to march in protest in Madrid.

The gesture to de Juana, who has already served his sentence for the murders and is in jail on charges of inciting terrorism, was part of an attempt to keep the door open to reviving peace talks, a government official privy to Zapatero's thinking said.

ETA, which has been weakened in recent years by prosecutions and police tactics, carried out only small attacks of late, without killing anyone from May 2003 until last December.

Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on Wednesday, however, that it was "evident that circumstances have changed."

On Thursday, two men and a woman accused of belonging to ETA were arrested in a raid in southwestern France, where many of the group's operatives are in hiding.

The woman, Alaitz Areitio Azpiri, 28, is suspected of recruiting and training ETA militants. One of the men, Aitor Lorente Bilbao, 40, had served seven years for weapons possession; the other, Igartua Echeverria, 37, had fled to France after a police operation against an ETA cell, the interior ministry said.

The conservative Popular Party continued to insist last week that it would back Zapatero in the fight against ETA only if he ruled out further negotiations with the group.
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