A person saw the terrorists after the crime, according to an ETA member, but has remained silent since then
A quarter of a century after
assassination of Miguel Angel Blanco There are still some unknowns about the crime that the passage of time seems unable to resolve. The best known refers to the place where the ‘Donosti commando’ kept the PP councilor kidnapped, while the least publicized is who was the witness who witnessed the escape of the assassins and has remained silent for 25 years.
The existence of this mysterious witness appears in the sentence by which
the murderers de Blanco, Francisco Javier García Gaztelu, ‘Txapote’ and Irantzu Gallastegi, ‘Amaya’, were each sentenced to 50 years in prison. The text cites ETA member Gregorio Escudero, one of the trusted men of ‘Txapote’ and to whom his boss confided both about how they carried out the crime and about the preparations. Escudero declared after his arrest in 2002 everything that García Gaztelu told him and in his testimony an enigmatic phrase appears that has been incorporated into the sentence. ‘Txapote’ told him that, after killing Blanco, “during the flight they were seen by a man.”
This unknown witness, however, never declared officially, neither before the judge, nor before the police forces. For ‘Txapote’, his existence seems to be important enough to entrust it to his subordinate, something that makes sense since his testimony would have made it possible to obtain some information about the murderers, their vehicle, a few hours after the crime. or his escape route. The terrorist who shot Miguel Ángel Blanco was already a well-known figure by then: his face was printed on thousands of posters and constantly appeared in the media. But the witness remained silent despite the fact that he witnessed the flight of some terrorists who minutes before had just perpetrated the crime that was shocking the country and for which millions of people had taken to the streets to ask ETA not to kill the mayor of the P.P.
This silence of a key witness points to one of the great problems in the fight against terrorism in Spain: the lack of citizen collaboration in many investigations. In the recent report of the European Parliament on the unsolved crimes of ETA, this issue is already pointed out. According to the text of the European experts, the gang’s campaigns against the security forces and against those accused of collaborating with police forces “sowed terror, silence and self-censorship in the majority of the population.” The Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism, in a report sent to parliamentarians who studied the situation created by unsolved crimes in Spain, abounds on this issue. According to this document, ETA imposed “the law of silence, nobody has seen anything, depriving those in charge of the investigations of key information to find out who was responsible for the murders and attacks in general.” It is paradoxical that, despite this ‘omertá’, Spain is the European country hit by terrorism that has managed to resolve the most attacks, above countries like Ireland, France or Italy.
What hides the silence?
The witness to the flight of Blanco’s assassins kept silent, but so did the assassins and their accomplices about the dungeon in which they kidnapped the popular mayor. The information surrounding the location of this place is fragmentary and inaccurate. The sentence recalls that the HB councilor in Eibar Ibon Muñoa, the direct collaborator in the kidnapping of Miguel Ángel, offered the terrorists an apartment that his parents had in Zarautz so that they could hide the councilor there. But ‘Txapote’, after examining the house, ruled it out. The murderer also asked Gregorio Escudero to look for a basement in the area between Orio, Lasarte and San Sebastián to carry out “a very notorious attack”. However, he then told her to forget it, since they had already found a place to hold the councilman.
In the sentence, it is narrated how ‘Txapote’ was the one who stayed in that unknown bajera watching Blanco while the other members of the commando rested. At some point there has been speculation about the possibility that the terrorists used a premises in Añorga that they had also used to prepare car bombs, but this extreme has never been proven nor does it appear in a court ruling. What hides this silence? Perhaps the fact that an unknown collaborator whom ‘Txapote’ protects did offer him a place to carry out that “notorious attack” that did meet the conditions he was looking for. Keeping quiet on this issue -García Gaztelu refused to testify in court- can protect that collaborator who facilitated the premises and who years later remains unpunished.
Topics
Miguel Angel Blanco Garrido
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