The 'ETA file' sent by France underpins the convictions of 10 ETA since the dissolution of the band

One of the weapons delivered by France, in February 2018, to Spain along with the tens of thousands of documents from the so-called 'ETA archive'.

The archive of ETA – thousands of documents of the terrorist group that, along with more than 300 weapons, France sent to Spain, for the most part, in 2018 – has allowed to shore up the convictions of 10 ETA members since the organization announced its dissolution in May of that year, according to a report by the Ministry of the Interior, to which EL PAÍS has had access. The document highlights that the analysis of all this information (more than 40,000 documents on paper and hundreds of terabytes in digital format) has allowed the Civil Guard and Police to prepare new intelligence reports to reinforce the accusations in the National Court, which have resulted in at least eight convictions.

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Interior predicts that these resolutions will not be the last, since both bodies have prepared other expert reports in cases that "follow their procedural course" and "still, to this day, the oral trial has not been held or there is no sentence." Despite this, the Interior also adds that analyzing the entire archive provided by France requires an effort "sustained over time", since the work is "laborious and thorough", in addition to needing a "very expert staff". In turn, he adds that only "a small percentage" of the papals delivered by Paris, also known as the "ETA stamps", will have "impact on past or present investigations" to clarify attacks.

These are, in chronological order, the eight judgments of the National Court included in the Interior report.

October 1, 2019. Prison officer Máximo Casado was killed on 22 October 2000 in Vitoria with a limpet bomb placed under his vehicle. On October 1, 2019, a few days before the 19th anniversary of that crime, the Court sentenced to 33 years in prison the ETA José Ignacio Guridi Lasa, Asier Arzalluz Goñi and Aitor Aguirrebarrena, members of the Totto command, as material authors of the attack, and the then leader of the band Javier García Gaztelu, Txapote, as its inducer. The judgment highlights the "special importance" that a document intervened in 2001 in southern France had in the meaning of the ruling.

On 22 October 2000, several people carried the coffin of Máximo Casado, a prison official murdered by ETA in Vitoria.Pradip J. Phanse

This document, provided as "Stamp DOM/V/CH1-40" was the kantada or self-criticism that one of the authors of the attack, Guridi Lasa, had made. The kantadas were manuscripts that the arrested terrorists sent to the leadership of the gang to detail how their arrest took place, as well as what information they provided to the police (including about attacks committed by them), and thus try to prevent the fall of more members of the organization. The report stresses that this self-criticism offered "details" of Casado's murder. According to the sentence, Guridi described how a fellow commander, Arzalluz Goñi, showed some "nervousness" when preparing the limpet bomb and did not use gloves to avoid leaving traces.

October 17, 2019. It took investigators almost 20 years to tie up a missing cape on José Carlos Apeztegia Jaka. The ETA had been sentenced in 1993 to more than 40 years in prison, but managed to maintain direct contact from prison with the leadership of ETA, to which he provided in 2002, despite his imprisonment, "data" on "prison officials and the headquarters of the union of civil servants ACAIP in Madrid". This maneuver was proven thanks to a letter (written in Basque and signed by Apeztegia) that the French security forces intervened in 2003, during an operation that allowed to capture, among others, Ainhoa García, Laia, considered the head of Information of ETA. On October 17, 2019, the National Court issued a new sentence against him (four more years in prison) for "a new crime of belonging to a terrorist organization during the time in which he was serving his sentence."

19 November 2020. At the end of the year 2000, the Totto command placed a bomb in a planter located on the windowsill of a house in Cintruénigo (Navarra), where they believed a civil guard lived. Among the perpetrators of the failed attack – the device did not explode – was José Ignacio Guridi Lasa, who was not convicted of this assassination attempt until two decades later. On November 19, 2020, the Court sentenced him to 52 years in prison after giving, again, enormous value to the kantada that Guradi himself wrote about his involvement in the failed crime: "The Cintruénigo thing did not explode," he pointed out in the document, written in his "own handwriting", according to the judicial ruling.

18 March 2021. In 2001, ETA detonated a car bomb as the vehicle of the then Director General of Science Policy, Juan Junquera, passed. Moments after the explosion, which caused injuries to him and his driver, the two alleged material authors were arrested, although the rest of the command managed to flee, including Juan Luis Rubenach. According to Interior, one of those arrested, Ana Belén Egües, would write a kantada intervened by the French police in 2002 in Tarbes, "decisive to ratify the veracity" of what she and her partner confessed then. This allowed the Court to convict, in March 2021, Rubenach to 1,008 years in prison for that attack, in a ruling that cites Egües' document nine times.

María Soledad Iparraguirre, alias 'Anboto', in a trial held against her at the Audiencia Nacional.Pool (Europa Press)

14 September 2021. María Soledad Iparraguirre, Anboto, accumulates convictions since France handed her over to Spain in 2019. One of them, for ordering the 1997 attack on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao when King Juan Carlos I was going to inaugurate it, which cost the life of an ertzaina. In September 2021, the Court sentenced Anboto to nine years in prison for her involvement in the attack, cornered by "a spiral notebook, without a cover and with a red back cover, A4 size and with graph paper" included in the ETA file. This contained annotations that placed Iparraguirre in the address of ETA with his name, surnames and, above all, aliases. A detail that, according to the Interior report, served to corroborate that it was Anboto, which allowed linking it to this and other attacks.

February 18, 2022. That day, the Court sentenced Iratxe Sorzábal to 24 and a half years in prison for a double attack perpetrated in Gijón on November 2, 1996, with the placement of a bomb in the Palace of Justice and another in the pharmacy of the husband of María Paz Fernández Felgoroso, Secretary of State for Penitentiary Affairs until a few months earlier. The magistrates considered his involvement proven thanks to a kantada of the terrorist herself contributed by France. "In November of '96, we put an explosive in the courthouse of Gijón and in a pharmacy. Marcos, Xabi and I did it," the document said, according to the Interior report.

Employees of the funeral services introduce in a van the body of the socialist councilor of Orio Juan Priede, murdered by ETA in 2002.JESÚS URIARTE

23 December 2022. ETA shot dead Juan Priede, a socialist councillor in Lasarte (Gipuzkoa) in 2002 when he was in a bar near his home. 20 years later, in December 2022, the Court sentenced Asier Eceiza to 19 years in prison for "verifying and expanding" the information to attack and for helping the material authors to flee. A sentence in which the kantadas of three other members of the command who committed it were key, intervened by the French police in an apartment in the town of Bergerac. The sentence affects that in a terrorist details in his self-criticism that, after leaving the scene of the crime, "Asier appears with his vehicle and we leave."

March 31, 2022. Interior stresses that the ETA file reinforced the evidence to convict, on March 31, 2022, the lawyer Arantza Zulueta to seven and a half years in prison for integrating the so-called "legal front" of ETA. "Based on the analysis" of three documents seized in Tarbes in 2002, "it is concluded that Matraka is the organic name of Zulueta, habitual lawyer of ETA militants and prisoners [...] She acted as a link or transmission belt between the prisoners and escapees with those responsible for ETA," he concludes.

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