Mystery Figure From Tv and Film Aided Eta Murder

A mystery figure said to be from the world of Spanish film and television has emerged as a central player in the most important assassination of recent Spanish history, the 1973 killing of General Franco's prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco.

Police files on the bomb attack, which was carried out by members of armed Basque separatist group Eta in a central Madrid street, say that "the man in the raincoat" handed Eta details of the routine followed by the admiral every Sunday morning, according to El Mundo newspaper.

Two senior members of Eta, José Miguel Barañán and Ignacio Pérez, were given the details in an envelope by a man they met in the bar of the Hotel Mindanao in Madrid.

The mystery man, police reports said, was around 30 years old. He was dressed elegantly and was believed to be involved in the world of films and television.

The envelope he handed to Barañán, while Pérez kept watch outside the hotel, showed that Carrero Blanco always attended mass at the same church at the same time on Sunday mornings.

The information enabled Eta to rent a ground-floor flat along the route his official car always followed, to tunnel under the central Claudio Coello street and to plant a 50kg (110lb) bomb.

The blast sent his Dodge car more than 35 metres (115ft) into the air and over the roof of a neighbouring five-storey building. The prime minister and two other occupants of the car were killed.

Carrero Blanco was the man most people expected to ensure that the Franco regime continued after the death of a dictator known to Spaniards as "el caudillo".

With Carrero Blanco out of the way, the continuity of Franco's regime after his death looked increasingly fragile.

"Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy began that day," the columnist Victoria Prego wrote in El Mundo yesterday.

El Mundo also revealed yesterday that a team of navy, army and civil guard officers took revenge on Eta for the killing five years later, when Spain had already become a democracy.

They travelled incognito to France and blew up Barañán with a bomb placed in his car at his home in the south-west of the country.

One of the navy officers, known as "Leonidas", told how the team of eight rightwing officers had planned to kill Barañán on the fifth anniversary of Carrero Blanco's death.

But Barañán was unwell and stayed in bed all day. It was only on the following day, when he finally left the house, that the car bomb killed him.

"We decided to act after the government passed an amnesty [for political prisoners] in 1977. We did not see how the prime minister's killers could be set free," Leonidas, now 55 and retired from the navy, told El Mundo yesterday.

He said that the explosives had been obtained by one of the officers from an American military base in Spain.

"The explosives came from an American base ... It was a personal favour [to one of the plotters]," he told El Mundo.