EUSKAD Murderous attack on
Basque deputies
TWO LEADERS of the revolutionary Basque nationalist party Herri
Batasuna (HB — The People United) were gunned down by attackers in the Alcalá Hotel in Madrid on November 20. Josu Muguruza was killed, with a bullet in the head. Inaki Esnaola was gravely wounded, with four bullets in the lungs. Both were deputies to the Spanish state parliament. The attack took place hours before the HB parliamentary group was to take the oath and begin to participate for the first time in the central legislative body. They were dining in the restaurant of their hotel, along with the manager of Egin, a bilingual radical nationalist Basque daily; and two journalists from the paper.
The murky background THE FIRST point is that there is a growing conviction as the go by that the state apparatuses were Implicated in the outrage The 10hd i Collier th
The attackers were two men in their thirties, one wearing a hood and police minister, Corcuera, the other a ski mask. In its November 21 issue, the Madrid daily El the various parties except the one that Muguruza belonged to!
Pais noted that in the Spanish state the 9-millimetre shells fired by confirms the impression that the assassins are used almost exclusively by the military. The they have something to hide from operation resembled other attacks and assassinations carried out public opinion
The political cover the perpetra by a shadowy murder gang calling itself the Grupo Antiterrorista de tore enjoyed la evident. There has
Liberación (GAL, Anti-terrorist Liberation Group), which evidence in been an operation to cut Herri court cases has linked to the Spanish state police secret services.
Batasuna off from the society.
And all the parties of the aystem,
The murders caused an outcry in the Basque country, leading to from the "right" to the left, all militant street protests and a massive, if very uneven general strike the media from the "official" to on November 22. The following are excerpts from an eye-witness the Independent, are implicated account of the shooting by Teresa Toda in Zutik, the journal of the
The terrorist attack on elected
Liga Kommunista Irautzailea (LKI, Revolutionary Communist representatives of HB.
League, the Fourth Internationalist organization in the part of the democratic righte of 200,000 citizens of this country, knocked the
Basque country in the Spanish state) and from the paper's editorial.
props out from under the pretenc es of a good part of the so-called constitutional "bloc." Its orientation has been to close ranks to prevent diesident voices from being heard, and to try to pul the moral responsibility on HB, to reduce street protest or strikes
As regards the reactions of parties and state institutions outside
Euzkadi, the picture la still worse
The culture of "anti-terrorism" Is soaking Into the society, and an aitack on a section of the Basque people in conflict with the state institutions can be presented as an attack on
"Spanish democra cy" and turned against Herri Balasuna Itself.
Herr Batasuna called for street demonstrations and a general strike, The result was a powerful mobilization, It la evident that these expressed a mass revulaion. In parlicular, the November
22 rally to pay homage to Josu
Muguruza Is comparable fo what happened five years ago when they assassinated Santi Brouard
It represented one of the peaks of mobilization for our people. *
Zutik
M ORE THAN a week after the
attack in the Hotel Alcalá, I still find it hard to believe. How could this happen? As we told ourselves that night, this cannot be true. But it is. And as the days go by, the terrible, unalterable facts are beginning to add up. There was a press conference where Herri Batasuna explained its proposals for the Madrid parliament.
Afterwards, they went to lunch, accompanied by HB's press secretary, Xabier Olega; Ramón Uranga the manager of Egin, and the paper's Madrid correspondent. The same people met again, some hours later, for dinner. At 11:10 [dinner hour comes late in the Spanish state], the first two shots could be heard, terribly dry, hard sounds, followed by others, up to 12 of them.
Under the tables, which were used as precarious cover by the diners, lay the bodies of Josu Muguruza and Iñaki Esnaola. Josu was close to death, and Iñaki was very badly wounded.
After the police arrived, they started asking all sorts of absurd questions, and adopted an attitude that verged on the offensive for those who had just come through such a trying experience. Remarks such as "What, don't tell us this is your first terrorist attack?" addressed to some of the eye-witnesses did not help
The facts are irrevocable. The question marks remain. How the attack was carried out seems to be becoming clear, although they have not managed to arrest the perpetrators. Who the targets were and why is
It is curious to watch the shifting back and forth in the police theories over whether the shots were aimed only at Esnaola or also at Muguruza. My impression is that the assassins knew quite well what they were doing, that they had defi-
It seemed to be quite a professional operation, in view of its rapidity (no more than 30 seconds) and the fact that more people were not hit. If they had been hyped-up amateurs, as has also been suggested, they probably would have hit more of the people in the dining room.
Another of the big enigmas is the possible presence in the same hotel of agents of the State Security Forces. Their mission, to judge from some information that appeared in the press, was clearly not to protect the deputies and senators but to Keep rakers then ements and even of 21 their conversations. *
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