16 April, 2017
Gorka Landaburu, who lost his thumb and was left blind in one eye after an ETA letter bomb detonated in his home in 2001, welcomed the disarmament and said lessons had been learned.
BAYONNE, France Basque militant group ETA has handed a list of eight arms caches to the French police through intermediaries, sources close to the matter told Reuters on Saturday. Spain refuses to negotiate with the armed group.
The group provided France with a list of locations for its arms caches - a move welcomed by Paris but deemed insufficient by Spain, which called on ETA to disband completely.
"The letter said that "'disarmament day' is tomorrow (Saturday)".
"We took up arms for the Basque people and now we leave them in their hands so that Basques can continue taking steps to achieve peace and freedom for our country", the statement concluded.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in the streets of Bayonne to celebrate the peace.
In recent years police in France and Spain have put Eta under severe pressure, arresting hundreds of militants, including leadership figures, and seizing numerous group's weapons.
Depleted by arrests and wracked by divisions among its members and political allies, ETA announced a definitive cease-fire in December 2011.
The French and Spanish governments are not acknowledging the initiative of the self-appointed "peace artisans".
"Eta has handed over its weapons to civil society".
On Friday, the leadership of the Basque Socialist Revolutionary Organization for National Liberation, ETA, announced their unilateral disarmament on Saturday after 40 years of armed struggle for independence. However, some Eta prisoners criticised him past year for compromising too much on their behalf.
France on Saturday mobilized almost 200 police along with bomb disposal experts to secure the weapons in the handover, according to the French interior ministry.
ETA's first known victim was a secret police chief in San Sebastian in 1968 and its last a French policemen shot in 2010. It was quoting a Bizi activist.
Democracy formally returned to Spain in 1978, three years after Franco's death, but ETA's campaign intensified.
Basque militant separatist group ETA, which waged a bloody campaign for independence from Spain for over half a century, said early on Friday it had given up all its arms and explosives. The commission is led by Ram Manikkalingam. "What remains to be done it to wipe out the hatred that ETA embedded in a large of Basque society".
Urkullu at the time called on the Spanish and French governments to "show ambitious vision and open direct lines of communication" with ETA. They demand ETA disband permanently. "They must disarm and they must dissolve", the spokesman said.
Spain issued a stern response and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said the group, which he described as "terrorists", could expect no government favors and "still less, impunity for their crimes". Critics dismiss the disarmament as theatre.
Experts view the disarmament as symbolic, saying ETA's arsenal had already been diminished, with much of it obsolete. But for many, it will be an historic moment which marks the end of the last insurgency in Europe.
