Spanish police arrest eight in ETA raid

Spanish police arrested eight people in an operation against the armed Basque group Eta, the Interior Ministry said today.

They were arrested in the northern Basque provinces of Guipuzcoa and Alava and in the neighbouring region of Navarra, according to a ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity as his post forbids him to be publicly identified.

Eta, whose name stands for Basque Homeland and Freedom, is blamed for more than 800 deaths since the late 1960s.

The organisation ended a nine-month ceasefire with a car bombing in Madrid that killed two people on December 30.

That attack smashed a tentative peace process, which had raised strong hopes for an end to the Basque conflict.

The ministry official could not immediately provide further details on the operation, adding that there could be more arrests.

News reports cited unidentified anti-terrorist officials as saying the arrests were not connected to the December 30 bombing, but they did not rule out that some of the detainees may have been planning terrorist actions.