The US removes ETA from the list of terrorist groups four years after its dissolution

ETA will soon cease to be considered an active terrorist group by the US.

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, communicated last Friday to the US Congress his intention to remove from the List of Terrorist Organizations (FTO, for its acronym in English) that his department prepares five armed organizations that he considers inactive, among them , ETA, according to what the Associated Press agency announced this Sunday.

The decision will materialize in the coming days with the publication of the decision in the US Federal Register.

The news has not caught the Spanish government by surprise, which was informed by Washington of the measure it was going to adopt, as government sources confirm to EL PAÍS.

These sources emphasize that both countries are "close and loyal partners" in many areas, including the fight against terrorism.

The decision of the US authorities comes more than 12 years after the gang's last fatal attack - the assassination, on March 16, 2010, of the French police officer Jean-Serge Nèrin -, almost 11 years after the October 2011 announced its final cessation of violence and four years later since it made public, in May 2018, the statement of its dissolution as an organization.

In its half century of existence, the organization murdered more than 850 people.

ETA had been on the list of terrorist groups since the State Department created it in 1997 to reinforce its security, and throughout these 25 years it affected other organizations around it, such as Askatasuna, Batasuna, Ekin, Euskal Herritarrok, Herri Batasuna, Jarrai-Haika-Segi, KAS and Xaki, who will probably no longer appear as well.

The inclusion in it seeks, mainly, to financially drown these groups through the application of sanctions such as the freezing of assets in the US and the prohibition of travel to this country for its members, as well as the prohibition of US citizens from providing support to them. with the provision of funds and other assistance, including medical care.

However, US legislation provides that, every five years, the permanence of terrorist organizations on the registry be reviewed.

In the case of ETA, this revision already took place, at least, in 2012, months after the announcement of the end of the attacks.

Then, the US administration considered that this announcement was not enough because "in the past it has broken various ceasefires" and that, therefore, the reality of that announcement still had to be verified.

As detailed by AP, this administrative examination - in which the time that the group has not committed attacks is analyzed and whether the elimination is in the interest of US national security - is the one that has now led to the decision to withdraw ETA of listing.

In the brief that Blinken has sent to the Congress of his country, he stated: “Based on a review of the Administrative Registry gathered in this matter and in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury, I determine that the circumstances that served as the basis for the designation [as a terrorist organization] have changed in such a way as to warrant revocation of the designation.”

Until now, only 15 armed organizations had left the US list;

among them, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, in Peru, or the Red Army of Japan.

Now, along with ETA, four other groups considered terrorists have been removed from that list.

The first is the Japanese Aum Shinkrikyo (AUM, better known as the sect of the Supreme Truth), author of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995 that cost the lives of 13 people, and whose main leaders, including its leader, Shoko Asahara, were executed in 2018 after being sentenced to death in 2004. Also removed from the list is the radical Orthodox Jewish group Kahane Chai, or Kach, founded in 1971 by the ultra-nationalist rabbi Meir Kahane and which is not linked to attacks since 2005.

The other two excluded organizations are jihadists: the Mujahidin Shura Council, which is accused of numerous rocket attacks against Israel and has not been credited with attacks since 2013;

and Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian Islamist movement that carried out numerous attacks during the 1990s to overthrow the government in Cairo.