The accusations against former ETA chiefs for the attacks they allegedly ordered continue to grow. The National Court is going to investigate four former gang leaders for the placement of a car bomb against the Ertzaintza police station in Ondarroa (Vizcaya), which left several agents and neighbors injured.

This is the decision of National Hearing Judge Alejandro Abascal, who admits to process the complaint filed by Dignity and Justice against Garikoitz Aspiazu, Txeroki; Aitzol Iriondo, Gurbitz; Mikel Carrera Sarobe, Atta; and Ainhoa ​​Ozaeta, Kurala.

The instructor decides to activate the investigation against the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office of the National High Court, opposed to the reopening of a case in which Txeroki was already charged before being filed. the other three former ETA chiefs had not been investigated for these events.

The attack consisted of planting a booby-trapped car near the police station. On September 21, 2008, a terrorist launched an attack on the building to cause the agents to leave and for them to be hit by the explosive. The agents noticed the vehicle with the trunk open and facing the police station. That saved their lives, but the deflagration was so violent that it caused 18 injuries, including 13 agents.

The Court has already sentenced the perpetrators of the attack, Asier Badiola and Ibon Iparraguirre, to almost 300 years in prison. The reopened investigation will determine if those who were then responsible for the terrorist group are added to the list.

As in the new investigations into the murders of Miguel Ángel Blanco or Gregorio Ordóñez, the basis for the accusations is the defendants’ membership in Zuba, the gang’s executive committee, and the decisive participation of its members in choosing the attacks. .

“ETA, since the beginning of the 1980s, has been established on the basis of a hierarchy based on a rigid discipline, which, protected by the secrecy of its leadership or executive committee, assumes all the managerial functions, so that there is nothing that dome does not control, promote or direct, as the body in charge of complying with the strategic lines of the criminal gang, “says Judge Abascal.

“Consequently,” the order continues, “the decision-making to carry out a terrorist action, applying the strategy designed by the executive committee, is disseminated to all the militants through these organic appointments, or through training courses and internal publications. The executive committee decides, coordinates, selects the objectives, sends the information, delivers the necessary material to attack, generically designates the objective and expressly orders to carry out the attack”.

The complaint and the order to open the investigation recall that the proven facts of the sentence that convicted the two material authors state that one of them met “with the leadership of the organization” and that “one of its members, nicknamed Txeroki , he pointed out to him, among the objectives to be carried out, to attack the Ertzaintza, and they should be the ones who would have to achieve the objective. To carry out the action, Txeroki announced that he would provide them with a fully prepared car bomb, indicating the place where to pick it up”.

In the case of Txeroki, for whom the case was provisionally filed in May, some new element was necessary to proceed with the reopening. That element, says the judge, is presented by Dignity and Justice, and refers to the “modus operandi of his Zuba in the form of delivering the car bombs used on those dates in 2008.”

Specifically, the complaint provides a ruling on an attack in Santoña the same day as the one in Ondarroa. In the sentence “it is declared proven that the Otazua commando (in Santoña) used a car delivered from France with the sign of ‘a loaf of bread on the dashboard’, as occurs with the commando in Vizcaya that committed the criminal action against the police station of Ondarroa.

“This similarity in both cases confers the circumstantial character, which is not unlikely, and necessary at this procedural stage to investigate and corroborate whether, in fact, Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, with this new information, could have had direct participation in the order to attack the Basque Police in Ondarroa”, adds the investigating judge.

The judicial resolution agrees to communicate the opening of the case to the four defendants so that they can appoint a lawyer and be summoned to testify as defendants.

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