France gives free rein to the extradition of historic ETA leader Josu Ternera

BarcelonaThe Paris Court of Appeal on Thursday acquitted the historic ETA leader José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, known as Josu Ternera, in the last proceeding he had open in France. The president of the court read the acquittal verdict before Ternera, who attended the hearing accompanied by his lawyers, as reported by the Efe agency. The trial, held in April, accused him of belonging to a terrorist organization for the period between December 2002 and May 2005, when he fled Spain – he was then a deputy in the Basque Parliament – to escape the investigation into his possible involvement in the 1987 attack on the Civil Guard barracks in Zaragoza, which killed eleven people.

The main evidence against him were DNA traces and fingerprints found in two ETA safe houses, in Lourdes and Villeneuve-sur-Lot, where the then military head of the group, Peio Eskisabel, and his lieutenant, José Manuel Ugartemendia, who were arrested in late April 2005, had lived. The French Public Prosecutor's Office had requested five years in prison, suspended, and definitive expulsion from the country.

With this acquittal, Ternera exhausts the last judicial proceeding pending in France, a condition that French justice had set as a prerequisite to be able to execute his handover to Spain. Last June, the Paris Court of Appeal had already given the green light to a European arrest warrant issued by the National Court, but had postponed its execution precisely until this case was resolved. Now, therefore, the way is open for Ternera to be finally handed over to Spain, where a trial awaits him for his alleged responsibility as an ETA leader, among other cases such as the Zaragoza attack and the financing of the group through the herriko taberna.

The Zaragoza attack has not expired despite the almost forty years that have passed: Article 131 of the Penal Code establishes that terrorism offenses do not prescribe if they have caused the death of a person, which would allow him to be tried for this act regardless of the time elapsed.

José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, alias 'Ternera'

Ternera, 75, joined ETA in 1968 and became one of its top leaders during the period of the group's bloodiest attacks, such as the Hipercor bombing and the attack on the Zaragoza barracks, both in 1987. Arrested in Bayonne in 1989 with a pistol and a grenade, he served a sentence in France before returning to clandestinity in 2002, when he fled Spain while being a member of the Basque Parliament. He remained a fugitive for nearly seventeen years until he was arrested in the French Alps in May 2019. Already on provisional release for health reasons since 2020, he was one of the figures who read ETA's dissolution statement in May 2018 and has since presented himself as one of the architects of the end of violence.