The verdict was no surprise, having been leaked last week and widely predicted long before that. But it still came as shock to the Spanish body politic, and brought the former prime minister, Mr Felipe Gonzalez, rushing back from his Moroccan holidays to Madrid last night.
A former interior minister and the cream of his anti-terrorist staff were sentenced yesterday to long prison sentences by the Supreme Court for the first action claimed by the Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberacion. The GAL went on to kill 27 people, almost all of them on French territory, in a "dirty war" against the Basque separatist organisation ETA which lasted from 1983 to 1987.
Mr Jose Barrionuevo, interior minister in Mr Gonzalez's Socialist government from 1982 to 1988, and (until yesterday) still a member of parliament, faces 10 years in jail for authorising the kidnapping of a man he knew to be innocent. Mr Segundo Marey, mistaken for a member of ETA, was seized by mercenaries from his French home, taken across the border with the collaboration of the Spanish security forces, and held in miserable conditions for 10 days in order to persuade the French authorities to release Spanish policemen in custody for a previous kidnap attempt on foreign soil, according to the court. Mr Barrionuevo's deputy, Mr Rafael Vera, and the former director of State Security, Mr Julian Sancristobal also got 10 years. Shorter sentences have been handed down to the ex-head of the Unified Anti-terrorist Command, Mr Francisco Alvarez, and seven of his subordinates. The former Socialist Party boss in the Basque Country has also been convicted.
Appeals procedures will delay their incarceration until September, but are deemed unlikely to succeed. The longest sentences are a little shorter than the 13-year terms which had been leaked to the press here last week, but this was due to a technicality.
A badly shaken Socialist executive was in emergency session last night, and will meet with regional party leaders this morning before issuing a detailed response. But it already appears that the party, which is attempting, under a new leadership, to shake off the corrupt and arrogant image of the Gonzalez period, will hold solidly to its position that Mr Barrionuevo and his deputy are innocent, and the victims of a politically motivated conspiracy.
This is not an easy case to sustain. All of their subordinates admitted their guilt, and most implicated the former minister and, in some case, Mr Gonzalez himself, in the GAL campaign. Nor is it edifying to see a democratic party gearing up to challenge a decision of the most senior members of the judiciary after an exhaustive investigative process.
A spokesman for the ruling conservative party ironically advised the Socialists to remain calm and take its medicine, "given that there are still 28 GAL cases to be tried". He was exaggerating, but a whole series of investigations into much more serious GAL crimes are in process. All of them point to members of the Socialist security apparatus. It becomes harder and harder for anyone who is not a card-carrying member of the party to believe that the GAL were not an instance of the State using terrorist methods to combat terrorism.
There is some comfort for the Socialists, however, in the detail of yesterday's sentence. Four of the 11 Supreme Court magistrates, including the court's president, believe there was insufficient proof to convict Mr Barrionuevo and Mr Vera, and have issued detailed individual statements of their discrepancies. A Socialist spokesman suggested yesterday evening that the party would not so much challenge the opinion of the magistrates who found their colleagues guilty, as support the dissenting minority who argued for their innocence.
"This is a clever line for the party to take," a senior legal source told The Irish Times last night. But he added it would do nothing to defuse the chronic tension which has poisoned Spanish political life in recent years. The other positive aspect of the sentence, from the Socialist point of view, is that it absolves all the defendants of "membership of an armed gang". Reading the small print, however, this comfort is likely to turn cold. The magistrates argue that, since the kidnapping was the first act of the GAL, the existence of an armed gang, properly speaking, could not be established at this stage.