French police arrest 'top Eta leaders'

French police have arrested two Basque militants considered top leaders of the armed separatist group Eta’s commando units, the Interior Ministry said.

Juan Antonio Olarra Guridi, 35, and Ainhoa Mugica, 32, were caught yesterday in Talence, near the southern city of Bordeaux, while driving a car with a fake licence plate, a ministry official said.

In Madrid, officials described the arrests as a major victory in the Spanish government’s battle against Eta.

The ministry official said a suspected French accomplice was also arrested along with the two militants. Her identity was not immediately known.

All three were being questioned at the judicial police headquarters in Bordeaux, investigators there said.

Spanish national radio said both detainees had belonged to two notorious Eta commando units from 1995 to 1997 and that Olarra Guridi took over control of all the commandos following the arrest of Eta operative leader Francisco Javier Garcia Gaztelu in February last year, also in France.

Olarra Guridi is accused of the 1996 murder of Francisco Tomas y Valiente, the former chief justice of the Constitutional Court – one of Eta’s most high-profile killings.

The judge was shot in the head three times as he sat in his office at the Madrid university where he taught law.

Mugica, who is believed to be romantically involved with Olarra Guridi, is suspected of taking part in a 1995 car bombing that targeted Jose Maria Aznar, now Spain’s prime minister and back then the leader of the opposition.

Both figure on official European Union and US lists of wanted international terrorists.

Eta is blamed for more than 800 killings during its 34-year-old campaign of bombings and shootings aimed at carving an independent Basque homeland out of territory straddling northern Spain and south west France.

The group has claimed or been blamed for 41 deaths since ending a 14-month-old ceasefire in January 2000.