Madrid, August 09: The Basque separatist organisation ETA claimed in a statement issued on Sunday responsibility for various attacks, including those that killed two Civil Guard officers and a police inspector it called a “torturer”.
In the statement released to the pro-independence Basque daily Gara, a regular channel for ETA communications, the group claimed the June 19 car bomb attack that killed 49-year-old police inspector Eduardo Puelles Garcia in the Basque town of Arrigorriaga.
The statement also claimed the July 30 car bomb attack outside a police barracks on the Mediterranean island of Majorca that killed two members of the Civil Guards paramilitary police.
It said Puelles was “the chief of police operations against numerous leftist independence activists and against pro-independence youths for the past decade, and the coordinator of different operations against ETA.”
“Sometimes, as the most experienced and despicable torturer in the commissariat … he was also pressured indepedence activists into collaborating by threats,” said the group.
ETA is blamed for the deaths of 828 people in its decades-long campaign for an independent Basque homeland encompassing parts of northern Spain and southwest France.
–Agencies