French police secure ETA weapons cache

Around 3.5 tonnes of arms, explosives and other materiel have been found in eight arms dumps identified by ETA, French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said yesterday, following the Basque separatist group’s vow to disarm.
“The French government welcomes this operation, carried out calmly and without violence,” Cazeneuve said in a statement. “It’s a decisive step towards the end of Basque separatist terrorism.”
ETA said in 2011 that it was abandoning its armed struggle for independence in the Basque region straddling the Spanish-French border and announced its “total disarmament” yesterday.
The group provided France with a list of locations for its arms caches – a move welcomed by Paris but deemed insufficient by Spain, which called on ETA to disband completely.
“The dangerous products will be destroyed,” Cazeneuve said. “Arms and equipment will be evaluated by justice authorities who will work, as always, in close collaboration with Spanish justice authorities to verify if the material gathered can help to resolve cases underway.”
He added: “Whether the disarmament is, effectively, total will also be established.”
The French premier said he hoped ETA’s vow to disarm would mark “the end of five decades of violence” and herald “an era of lasting peace which the Basque Country should never have gone without”.
ETA says its initiative will bring the final curtain down on a decades-long armed campaign to gain independence for the Basque country straddling the Spanish-French border.
Earlier yesterday France mobilised nearly 200 police officers along with bomb disposal experts to secure the weapons in the handover, according to the French interior ministry.
“Police services went to the sites indicated (by ETA) and found, in metal containers and bags, dozens of handguns and rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, several hundred kilogrammes of explosives and components of explosives, several hundred detonators and timers,” the Paris prosecutor said in a statement.
The ETA list would also be handed to investigators working on a preliminary investigation opened last week by the Paris Prosecutor’s Office into offences involving weapons used by organised gangs and terrorist enterprises, the statement added.
“This stage of neutralising an arsenal of arms and explosives is a major step,” French Interior Minister Matthias Fekl said.
At a news conference in the French Basque city of Bayonne earlier yesterday, a group called the International Verification Commission (IVC) confirmed that it had received a list of arms caches from intermediaries that it handed “to the French authorities”.
Founded in 1959, ETA has been blamed for the deaths of 829 people in a string of bombings and shootings dating back to 1968.
Thousands more were injured.
In 2011, after a string of arrests among its senior ranks, ETA announced that it had abandoned its armed campaign.
But the move did not, until now, entail disarmament.
ETA more recently sought to negotiate its dissolution in exchange for amnesties or improved prison conditions for roughly 350 of its members held in Spain and France, and for current members living under cover.
But both France and Spain have taken a firm line and refused any concessions.
The IVC, set up to monitor ETA’s 2011 ceasefire pledge, is not recognised by either the French or the Spanish governments, but its involvement is supported by the government in Spain’s autonomous Basque region.
Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams welcomed ETA’s “historic” decision to put “its weapons beyond use”.
Adams is credited with convincing the IRA (Irish Republican Army) to give up their armed campaign, putting an end to more than three decades of conflict between British authorities and Northern Ireland which killed over 3,000 people.
He also called on the French and Spanish governments to “demonstrate generosity in their response” and for Spanish authorities to “address the issue of political prisoners”.
Madrid has dismissed ETA’s disarmament as a unilateral affair.
“The only logical response to this situation is (for ETA) to announce its definitive dissolution, to apologise to its victims and to disappear rather than mount media operations to disguise its defeat,” said the Spanish government in a statement yesterday.
Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said ETA, which he described as “terrorists”, could expect no government favours and “still less, impunity for their crimes”.
The governing conservative People’s Party staged an event late on Friday in the Basque city of Vitoria in which there was a ceremony for “the protagonists of ETA’s defeat”.
Relatives of ETA victims took part.
The disarming of ETA is “a historical event”, Arnaldo Otegi a former leader of ETA’s political wing Batasuna told AFP, stopping short of saying whether he thought the ETA would disband.
“I believe that ETA must start a debate between militants about its future,” added the 58-year-old, who had been imprisoned for a kidnapping.