Eta plays down French police shooting

The Basque separatist group Eta tried to play down its growing confrontation with the French police yesterday, claiming that the three recent gunfights in which two officers were seriously injured were "chance skirmishes".

Its claim is unlikely to pacify the French police, who are increasingly determined to crack down on Eta, which has killed 800 people in Spain in the past 30 years.

In a statement published in the radical Basque daily Gara, Eta said that its gunmen had no option but to shoot after they were stopped at police checkpoints three times in the past three weeks. It claimed that the French police had "kidnapped" the Eta members involved.

The incidents were not a result of its opening a "new front in France", contrary to what Spanish politicians had said, Gara reported, quoting extracts from the Eta statement.

The statement did not explain why Eta, which has traditionally kept its command, training and logistical structures on French soil while carrying out its attacks in Spain, had changed its normal strategy of not resisting the French police.

Spain's national police chief, Juan Cotino, said Eta had recently ordered its members "to shoot rather than be detained".

Eta also failed to explain firebomb attacks on the homes of eight French police officers in the Basque country in the past year. In the latest of them, on Saturday, a police officer's home in Ascain, south-west France, was badly damaged.

The French media recently received an unsigned communique saying that the attacks were in response to the police crackdown on the organisation.

The Eta statement came the day after the French police arrested four suspected members of the group in the southern town of Auch.

They were said to have taken part in up to 18 killings and in an attempt to murder the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, in 1995.