FRENCH POLICE detained three of Eta’s most wanted leaders near the French alpine ski resort of Le Corbier in the early hours of yesterday morning.
The three men were armed and had false identity papers when police raided their 13th-floor apartment.
One was named as Alberto Machain, who was named along with five other suspects, after the Eta bomb blast in Palma de Mallorca last month which killed two young civil guards, and four explosions 10 days later which caused damage to nearby tourist installations.
Eta, which has been blamed for more than 800 deaths over the past 50 years, last week claimed responsibility for the Mallorca bombings and also one the previous week outside a civil guard barracks in Burgos in which 30 people were injured, none of them seriously.
The other two are Aitzol Etxaburu (30), blamed for a car bomb attack in Avila in 2005, and he is also accused of taking part in the murder of Isaias Carrasco, a Basque socialist councillor two years later.
The third man is Andoni Sarasola (37), who has been on the run since escaping from a police raid in Bilbao last September. He is the brother of Martin Sarasola, jailed for his part in the bombing of Madrid airport in 2006 in which two men died. The three are believed to have taken over Eta’s logistical and military wing at the beginning of July following the arrest of the previous leader Itziar Plaza.
Spanish interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said: “They were responsible for supplying arms, ammunition and explosives to the terrorists.”
The minister said that in the apartment police found four revolvers, computer discs – which he said were being studied and are expected to reveal valuable information – 42 industrial detonators and 20 plastic containers, of a kind used as limpet bombs, packed with explosives.
Parked outside the apartment was a grey Peugeot van, stolen in Paris last June, which was towed away by police yesterday.
The Le Corbier operation led to a second important discovery, that of an Eta weapons cache some 800kms away in the Pyrenees and close to the Spanish border.
Hidden in thick undergrowth, near the isolated mountain village of Ferrer, police found 100 kilos of ammonium nitrate and a large quantity of bomb-making chemicals.
Mr Rubalcaba praised the efficiency of Spanish and French police in this and other anti-terrorist operations. “Since the summer of 2007 there has been an average one major anti-terrorist operation every four months with the detention of many of Eta’s most wanted terrorists,” he said.