The ETA Natividad Jáuregui, known by the aliases Jaione and Pepona, has been released. The National Court decreed this Thursday his release after considering the crimes attributed to him for the attack against Lieutenant Colonel Ramón Romeo, murdered by the terrorist group in 1981 with a shot to the back of the head, time-barred. Since the Belgian authorities arrested her and handed her over to Spain in November 2020, after spending almost four decades on the run, Ella Jáuregui has spent three years in preventive detention waiting to be tried for this crime. An oral hearing that, as the court has concluded, should not be held.
Through a resolution dated this Thursday, the Criminal Chamber gives a major twist to the judicial procedure that was still alive against Jáuregui. Contrary to the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office, the court argues that the criminal responsibility of ETA for the murder of the lieutenant colonel expired 20 years after the attack, since during that entire time the investigation was not directed against it. And, for this reason, the magistrates have agreed to file the case and ordered his release with precautionary measures: since there is still an appeal before the Supreme Court, he is obliged to appear in court once a month, he is prohibited from leaving of the country and his passport has been withdrawn.
Pepona was the last ETA member left in prisons outside the Basque Country and Navarra. The sexagenarian, whose participation in the murder of Ramón Romeo was proven by a Spanish court, was being held in the Alcalá Meco penitentiary center (Madrid). According to her defense sources, she has already been released from prison.
The prescription of crimes has hovered over this case since the handover of Jáuregui by Belgium. The defense has alleged this circumstance on several occasions, but has not found a positive answer until this Thursday, when the Criminal Court agreed with it. The magistrates now conclude that, since the attack was committed in 1981, the judicial process was not directed against Jáuregui until December 2005, when an indictment order was issued. And, by then, the 20 years provided by law for prescription had already passed.
At this point, the Court casts some criticism on the investigation, as it points out that there were suspicions of Jáuregui’s participation since 1987, when one of her companions (Enrique Letona) implicated her in the crime during a statement at police headquarters. But he did not act against her. An “absence of investigative judicial will that surprises the Chamber at this time,” the magistrates insist in their resolution this Thursday.
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The anti-terrorist forces highlight that Jáuregui was a member of the Vizcaya command in the eighties. According to the ruling of the National Court that convicted three of his companions—Enrique Letona, Sebastián Echániz and José Antonio Borde—for the murder of Ramón Romeo, Pepona participated in the crime and was responsible for shooting the lieutenant in the back. colonel when he left listening to mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Begoña in Bilbao. She denies it.
Born in 1958 in San Sebastián, Jaione remained a target of the Police for a long time. According to the Ministry of the Interior, in 1978 she fled to France for the first time after she was linked to the Iskulin command. But, after a while, he decided to return and joined the Vizcaya command. As a member of that group, he allegedly committed several attacks, before leaving again for the French country, from where he moved to Mexico. There she was located in 2002, but she vanished again. “[Entonces]returned clandestinely to Europe and settled in Belgium, where she would be arrested in the city of Ghent in 2013,” the security forces stressed.
Belgian authorities
The National Court then promoted the process to achieve the surrender of Jáuregui, but ran into the Belgian authorities. Despite the issuance of two international arrest warrants, the courts of that country rejected the extradition considering that Spain could violate the fundamental rights of the ETA member and they released her. In 2017, the military man’s family finally appealed to Strasbourg, which condemned Belgium, thus reactivating the surrender that would culminate in November 2020.
Jáuregui’s life in Belgium generated special indignation among ETA victims for years. Until his extradition was achieved, Ramón Romeo’s family denounced that the ETA member, who had settled in Ghent, spent her days “like a queen” when she was “a murderer through and through.” Pepona had worked in restaurants, had collaborated on a cookbook, had opened her own establishment and “lived without hiding,” according to Belgian public radio television RTBF. When she was arrested in 2013, she had her social media profile filled with dozens of haute cuisine dishes and recipes.
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