Spain: "Credible" that ETA suspects trained in Venezuela

Madrid, Agency
The suggestion that two suspected members of the Basque terrorist group ETA received training in Venezuela is "credible," Spain's interior minister said Tuesday.

But that does not mean that the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez "had anything to do with that training," Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters in Madrid.

"There is no information, no affirmation about the two suspected Etarras that would allow us to infer, deduce, or even suspect that the Venezuelan government had anything to do with this," he said.

Nonetheless, Rubalcaba asked authorities in Caracas for an in-depth investigation of whether the suspects, Javier Atristain and Juan Carlos Besance, did receive training on Venezuelan soil in 2008 and if so, was exiled former ETA member Arturo Cubillas involved.

"The Venezuelan government has told us that they will investigate. We have no doubt that they will," he said.

The minister described as "serious" the relations that ETA maintains with Cubillas, who was granted asylum in Venezuela decades ago at the request of the then-Spanish government and who in 2005 was appointed to public office in the Andean nation.

Rubalcaba said it is plausible to think that ETA carried out their training in Venezuela because by 2008, pressure on the group from French authorities "made it impossible" for them to remain in France.

So the ETA fighters went to Venezuela, "where there was less security control and it would be easier for them," the minister said.

ETA has killed more than 800 people since 1968 in its violent campaign to create an independent Basque state in parts of northern Spain and southwestern France.

Rubalcaba said that antiterrorist collaboration with Venezuela has improved "substantially" since March, when Spanish National Court Judge Eloy Velasco reported possible connections between the Caracas government, ETA and leftist guerrillas in Colombia.

Since then "a number of things have occurred in Venezuela that show its government is gearing up to deal with the matter," he said.

Rubalcaba avoided commenting on the statement made Tuesday by the Venezuelan ambassador to Spain, Isaias Rodriguez, that he has "serious doubts" about whether the testimony of Atristain and Besance before the judge was "completely voluntary."

But the minister noted that the explanation made later by the envoy left it clear that he was not saying they might have been tortured.