MADRID (Reuters) – A former military leader of the now disbanded Basque separatist group ETA, who is known by the alias “Txeroki”, has been transferred from a French prison to serve out the rest of his sentence in Spain.
Etxerat, an association representing family members of people imprisoned for ETA activity, said on its website Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubin, 51, had been moved from the Lannemezan prison in the French Pyrenees to a jail near San Sebastian in Spain’s northern Basque region.
Spanish prison authority sources confirmed the transfer, state news agency EFE reported.
Under European Union law, people imprisoned in another country within the bloc can request to serve their sentence in their home country.
Garikoitz Aspiazu was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a French court in 2013 after he was arrested in 2008 near the border with Spain and linked to the kidnapping of a Spanish couple and a child in the region a year earlier.
At the time of his arrest, he was Spain’s most wanted person because of his alleged role in a 2006 bomb attack on Madrid airport that killed two people.
The French court found him guilty of having made some 500 kg (1,100 pounds) of explosives as well as abducting the couple and their child while they were on a camper van trip.
Following his arrest, he was also tried in a court in Madrid, which in 2011 sentenced him to 377 years in prison for 20 attempted assassinations.
ETA began its violent campaign for the independence of traditional Basque territories in northern Spain and southwest France in the late years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s.
The group announced its dissolution in 2018, ending Western Europe’s last major armed insurgency, a 50-year campaign that killed more than 850 people in Spain.
(Reporting by Charlie Devereux; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Helen Popper)
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