The two journalists whom ETA’s Gaua commando tried to assassinate in November 2000 by placing a flowerpot with two and a half kilos of dynamite at the door of their house, in the city of San Sebastián, have narrated what happened this Monday before the court of the National Court that judges Patxi Macazaga, Jon Zubiaurre, Imanol Miner and Asier García Justo for three attempted terrorist murders, who have acknowledged the facts. «It meant changing our entire life, all our relationships. “It marked my entire life,” they explained. This is the couple that made up Aurora Intxausti, who worked for the newspaper ‘El País’, and Juan Palomo, who worked for Antena3, both stationed in the Basque Country. They had an 18-month-old son and, as they have detailed before the court, it is not that they felt threatened, but they did feel marked by ETA, especially she, who had to see her name on a graffiti when, still pregnant, she was heading to the doctor and endured a campaign by the ETA newspaper Ekin accusing her of imprisoning people with her publications. That November 10, they were preparing to leave the house like any other morning, but Palomo heard “something like a firecracker” when he opened the door to the apartment, a sixth, in which they lived. He looked out and found a pot with a plant on the doormat. Wiring stuck out of the ground. She was “putting a hat on the child” to take him to daycare when he told her to put the baby down and look out as well. The next thing was to lock themselves with the child “to play Lego” in the room furthest from the entrance while he called the Ertzaintza and they arrived at the home. Related News Invites the Senate to resort to the standard Constitutional Yes Congress maintains that it acted in accordance with the law with the law that benefits ETA members Patricia Romero One of the agents who ran up the six flights of stairs to reach the flower pot, attested to the courtroom of the National Court of what he found: “a black cable and a red one” protruding from the ground. They evacuated the building and then the checks would come. There were “two and a half kilos of dynamite and two and a half kilos of screws”, lethal shrapnel hidden under the fern that ETA had placed on the mat, after manipulating the portal access to guarantee a clean entry and exit from the building. It had to have exploded when the door opened. «I thought they had put a black cat at the door as a threat or something. And when I saw the pot with the cable sticking out, I started to lose control. I picked up the boy, he started crying and we went to a room and I took out the Legos and we started playing. “You enter a nebula in which you don’t know how time works,” she explained as a witness at the trial. Expelled from the Basque Country“My life changed radically,” he continued. We had to leave the Basque Country, we came to Madrid… But it changed our lives and the lives of all the journalists in the Basque Country who did not agree with ETA,” he added. It was a turning point for the informants, since those who remained would have an escort from that moment on. That was what was offered to this couple, two police officers to accompany each one during the rest of their days in the Basque Country. They thought that this was no way to take care of a child or, in Intxausti’s words, four is a lot of people “to push the child on the swing.” And they left there. “There are friends who lost a baby when they heard the news on the radio,” added Palomo, whose father, who suffered from a heart condition, died two years later and a funeral had to be held completely protected by the Ertzaintza. “All my family and friends were marked,” he added. She, “24 years and 15 days later”, as she has pointed out, is still medicated. The Prosecutor’s Office has requested nearly 75 years in prison for each of the accused for the three attempted terrorist murders and the crime of havoc, who have acknowledged their participation in the events with a brief assent. The penalty includes exile for the victims: five years after the sentence has been served, in which they will not be able to approach them or their families.
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