The murder on June 25, 1998 of the PP councilor in Errenteria (Gipuzkoa) Manuel Zamarreño, one of the more than 200 ETA crimes that were unpunished when the terrorist organization announced its dissolution in 2018, already has culprits. The National Court made public this Friday the sentence condemning the ETA members Francisco Javier García Gaztelu, alias Txapoteand his romantic partner, Irantzu Gallastegui Sodupe, Amaia, to 110 years in prison for each of them as material authors of the murder of the mayor using a motorcycle bomb. In that attack, the ertzaina who was escorting the politician and a woman who was nearby were seriously injured. The Prosecutor’s Office and the victim’s family requested 120 years in prison for both. During the oral hearing, held last January, the two ETA members refused to answer the questions. “I am not going to participate and I refuse to defend myself,” said García Gaztelu, who is already serving a sentence for a dozen murders and is still being investigated in other cases.
The ruling considers it proven that Txapote and Amaia were, at the end of the nineties, part of the Donosti commando, the only one who at that time was active and capable of attacking. Both and a third member of the group, José Luis Geresta ―who died in 1999―, then received the “instruction” from the ETA leadership to assassinate public officials of the PP. The terrorist organization had launched the strategy they had called the “socialization of suffering”, which made the PP and PSOE councilors the priority target of their attacks.
Within that campaign, the ruling adds, the members of the command “set as their objective” to kill Zamarreño, who had assumed the position of councilor of Errenteria just a month before his death, replacing his party colleague José Luis Caso, also murdered by the gang on December 11 of the previous year. In an interview, Zamarreño’s daughter recalled the harsh climate of harassment that the PP councilors suffered at that time: “To me aita [padre] They shouted at him from the balconies: ‘Zamarreño, you are dead.’ His name also frequently appeared in graffiti on the streets inside a target, and his car was set on fire.
The crime was perpetrated at 11:10 on June 25, 1998. According to the court, the three members of the command placed an artifact composed of between one and two kilos of amonal in a cloth bag on a motorcycle that Amaia had acquired a few days before with false documentation and that they had parked on a sidewalk near the popular councilor’s home. When the victim passed by her after buying her bread in a nearby store and “was unprepared and without any ability to react defensively,” the terrorists detonated the bomb and caused her death, the ruling emphasizes.
The magistrates detail the numerous indications that lead them to the conviction that the perpetrators of the attack were Txapote – who would later access a relevant position in the leadership of ETA – and Amaia. In this sense, they highlight that the owner of the store where the motorcycle used five days before the attack was purchased recognized the ETA member as the person who bought it using documentation from a third person. It also highlights that she provided the clerk with a telephone number that police investigations later revealed had been used to collect information a year earlier to commit an attack against another PP politician in Gipuzkoa for which she has already been convicted.
The sentence also gives special value to the material that was seized, in 1999, in a safe house in the town of Andoain (Gipuzkoa) that had been used by the command, and in which footprints of those now convicted were found along with the weapons. used in attacks against other public officials, several kilos of explosive material, radio controls to activate bombs remotely and handwritten documents that police reports attribute to Amaia. The expert analysis carried out by the Ertzaintza on this material concluded that there were “common elements” between it and those used in seven attacks, including the one that caused the death of Zamarreño. The magistrates highlight that both this expert report and other “intelligence” reports on the functioning of ETA that were prepared by the National Police and the Civil Guard, reinforce the evidence against Txapote and Amaia.
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For all this, the court shows its “founded conviction” that “only they could have been the co-authors of the manufacture and placement of the explosive bomb on the motorcycle” that cost Zamarreño his life. For this reason, it condemns both of them for one crime of completed terrorist murder, two attempted, terrorist injuries, havoc and possession, manufacture, transportation and placement of an explosive device for terrorist purposes. The ruling also establishes the payment of compensation to the councilor’s widow and children – who were minors at the time – as well as another to the bodyguard for the serious injuries suffered.
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