Imprisoned ETA military leader transferred from French prison to Spain | The Mighty 790 KFGO

MADRID (Reuters) – A former military leader of the now-defunct Basque separatist group ETA, known by the code name “Txeroki”, has been transferred from a French prison to serve the remainder of his sentence in Spain.

Etxerat, an association representing families of people imprisoned for ETA activities, said on its website that 51-year-old Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubin had been transferred from Lannemezan prison in the French Pyrenees to a prison near San Sebastian in the Basque Country in northern Spain.

Sources in the Spanish prison authority confirmed the transfer, the state news agency EFE reported.

Under European Union law, people imprisoned in another country within the bloc can request to serve their sentence in their home country.

Garikoitz Aspiazu was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a French court in 2013 after being arrested near the border with Spain in 2008 and linked to the kidnapping of a Spanish couple and a child in the region a year earlier.

At the time of his arrest, he was Spain's most wanted man for his suspected role in a bomb attack at Madrid airport in 2006 that left two people dead.

The French court found him guilty of manufacturing about 500 kg of explosives and kidnapping the couple and their child during a camper van trip.

After his arrest, he was also brought before a court in Madrid, which sentenced him to 377 years in prison in 2011 for 20 attempted murders.

ETA began its violent campaign for independence of the traditional Basque territories in northern Spain and southwestern France in the late years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s.

The group announced its dissolution in 2018, ending the last major armed insurgency in Western Europe, a 50-year campaign that left more than 850 people dead in Spain.

(Reporting by Charlie Devereux; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Helen Popper)