The Spanish militant separatist group ETA has warned Italian tourists to stay away from Spain, Italian police said this evening.
The warning, written in four languages, Basque, French, Spanish and English on a single sheet of paper, was sent to five tour operators in Italy - one each in Padua, Florence and Bologna, and two in Rome.
The note said "not to promote Spain as a tourist destination" and "not to support Spanish fascism," police said.
It was posted in France on December 12th in the southwest town of Bayonne, close to the border of Spain's Basque region, investigators said this evening, and not in a village near Lourdes, as earlier reported.
The text, which bore the stamp of ETA, was accompanied by a rudimentary home-produced leaflet showing the sites of some ETA attacks in Europe.
There was no reference to the booby-trapped parcels, all defused by police explosives experts, sent recently to the Spanish national carrier Iberia.