Spanish court grants parole to terminally ill ETA activist

Spain's top criminal court granted parole to a dying member of the militant Basque separatist group ETA Wednesday, despite fierce resistance from those who have lost loved ones to the group's attacks. The court voted four to one in favour of conditional release for Iosu Uribetxebarria, a convicted kidnapper who is in the terminal phase of cancer. Their ruling confirmed a lower court ruling late last month. Prosecutors had appealed the original decision and Wednesday's ruling is also bound to revive the polemic over the affair. Uribetxebarria was jailed for kidnapping a prison official in the 1990s and has been transferred to a hospital in the Basque Country where he is being treated for cancer. The government last month cited "humanitarian grounds" covered by Spanish law in a statement on his case. "Despite the crimes committed by the convict, it is without doubt that the seriousness of his illness, its foreseeable development and the nature of the treatment greatly mitigate the dangerousness of the prisoner and practically annul the risk of re-offending," the government statement said. But victims' families immediately accused it of giving in to the group, which is blamed for hundreds of killings. "This concession to terrorists is a victory for ETA," said an association representing the families of ETA's victims, AVT, in a statement issued last month. At the call of the victims' associations, hundreds of people demonstrated on Saturday in the Basque Country in Madrid against any decision to release him, denouncing the position of Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz Francisco Jose Alcaraz, the head of one group, "Voice against Terrorism" (VCT) denounced what he called the "treason" of the government, which had promised to take a tough line against the Basque separatists. Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted in a television interview Monday that he was unhappy with the situation, but under the law, people were not meant to die in prison. As part of his campaign for parole due to his illness, Uribetxebarria had staged a hunger strike for 10 days and scores of other jailed ETA members joined in the action. AVT denounced the government for having "given in to the blackmail" of the hunger strikers. Last month a Spanish court banned a demonstration in the Basque city of Bilbao by those backing his release, saying it would glorify terrorism. Uribetxebarria was sentenced in 1998 to 32 years in jail for the kidnapping of a prisons official, Jose Antonio Ortega Lara, who was held for 532 days. ETA is blamed for more than 800 killings in a four-decade campaign of bombings and shootings to create a Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France. In October, it announced a definitive end to armed actions but has neither formally disarmed nor disbanded. The Spanish government refuses to negotiate with it, demanding it disband.