THOUSANDS MARCH IN SUPPORT OF RETURNING THE JUANAR TO PRISON

Edition 526

About ten thousand people demonstrated in Bilbao last Saturday to protest the Supreme Court's annulment of part of the electoral lists of the Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV) party on the grounds that the candidates in fact belonged to the banned Batasuna party, which is the political wing of the Basque terrorist group ETA. Batasuna leader Joseba Permach said the legal decision against the ANV was nothing more than an election putsch by the ruling Socialist Party and the Basque National Party (PNV) "to keep their seats". Fearing that ETA would react violently to the ANV annulments, PNV president Josu Jon Imaz has presented an anti-terrorist pact proposal to all the political parties, but especially to Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy. There has been no response so far. Meanwhile, in Madrid and several other cities, thousands of people marched to support a demand for convicted ETA terrorist Iñaki De Juan Chaos to be returned to jail to serve out the rest of his sentence. He is currently recovering from a long hunger strike in a hospital in San Sebastian and has been photographed outside the hospital with his girlfriend on several occasions. From there he will be sent home to finish his sentence under house arrest. De Juana led the ETA commando group in Madrid in the mid-1980s that killed 25 people, including 12 Guardia Civil who died in a car bomb attack, and wounded at least 60 others.