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Police in Spain say they discovered ETA explosives cache

Spanish police say they have found a cache of some 100kg of explosives belonging to the Basque group ETA.

Civil Guards found the explosives on Thursday in the northern town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. They were accompanied by Arkaitz Goikoetxea, one of nine suspected ETA members arrested earlier this week.

A police official — speaking on condition of anonymity because of force regulations — said anti-terror magistrate Baltasar Garzon flew to the scene to oversee the search.

Goikoetxea is considered the leader of an ETA cell believed responsible for nearly a dozen bomb attacks, including the May car bombing of a police barracks in Legutiano in which an officer died.

Goikoetxea told a judge on Thursday that ETA had ordered him to kill Garzon’s National Court colleague Judge Fernando Grande Marlaska, the police official said. The judge owns a house in a town near where the arms dumps were found.

The cell was also reportedly planning to carry out other attacks in and around Bilbao.

“We can’t say that this was ETA’s only command cell, but it clearly was its most active, its most dynamic,” Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on Wednesday.
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