France gives the go-ahead for the extradition of historic ETA leader Josu Ternera
The Court of Appeal of Paris acquits him of the charge of belonging to a terrorist organization between 2002 and 2005
BarcelonaThe Paris Court of Appeal acquitted this Thursday 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 in front of 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 – then a deputy in the Basque Parliament – to escape an 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 chief 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 execute his extradition 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 deferred its execution precisely until this case was resolved. Now, therefore, the way is open for Ternera to finally be 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 prescribed despite almost forty years having passed: Article 131 of the Penal Code establishes that terrorism offenses do not prescribe if they have caused a death, which would allow him to be tried for this act regardless of the time elapsed.
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 his sentence in France before returning to clandestinity in 2002, when he fled Spain while being a deputy in 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 out ETA's dissolution statement in May 2018 and has since presented himself as one of the architects of the end of violence.
