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ETA suspected in fatal shooting

A member of the Spanish Civil Guard was shot and killed in southwest France on Saturday by suspected members of Basque separatist group ETA, officials said, the first death blamed on the group since it abandoned a ceasefire in June.

The daytime shooting took place in a supermarket parking lot in Capbreton, a sleepy resort town on the Atlantic coast near Biarritz, the Spanish and French interior ministries said. Another Spanish officer was injured in the attack and was hospitalized in serious condition, the hospital said.

The suspects kidnapped a woman briefly and used her car to flee; they were being pursued by French and Spanish police, a police official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The woman was tied to a tree in the forest, but broke free and reached police in the nearby town of Leognan, the police official said.

If ETA was responsible, it will be taken as a sign the group can still stage attacks despite the arrest of many members and that it remains active in its push for an independent Basque state. Media reports called it the first death attributed to ETA in France in decades.

"Today ETA has committed a criminal act," Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said.

"Forty years of black terrorist history have not been enough for them to learn to judge the immense strength of Spain's society," Zapatero said.

He identified the dead guardsman as Raul Centeno and the injured one as Fernando Trapero.

Both, he said, were "very young."

Zapatero's Socialist government came under pressure when peace talks with ETA stalled last year. Since then, he has taken a hard line toward the group and its political wing, Batasuna.

ETA declared a ceasefire in March last year but grew frustrated with peace negotiations with the government.

It killed two people in a car bombing last December and declared the truce formally over in June. Saturday's killing was the first blamed on the group since then.

The officers, on a routine anti-terrorist operation with French counterparts, had stopped for coffee and found themselves a few tables away from the ETA suspects, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told reporters in Capbreton.

As the officers returned to their car, the suspects approached them, words were exchanged and gunshots were fired, Alliot-Marie said, calling the result murder in "cold blood."

The guardsmen were unarmed at the time of the shooting, the newspaper El Pais said on its Web site.

Alliot-Marie said that the two guardsmen had been tracking ETA members "who come to French territory to seek refuge or to prepare operations."

Spanish and French police chasing Basque separatists often conduct operations on each other's territory.

Alliot-Marie and Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba both traveled from a ministers' meeting in Germany to the site of the attack.

ETA, which has killed about 800 people since the late 1960s, has staged several attacks since June but there had been no fatalities or serious injuries until on Saturday.

Spain's governing Socialist Party, gathered at a rally in Madrid, asked for a minute of silence in memory of the dead guard. Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the opposition, did the same at a rally in Madrid.
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