WILLENCOURT – Police arrested a suspected Basque separatist commander posing as a holidaymaker with accomplices in a remote village in France, officials and locals told AFP on Friday. The counter-terrorism squad swooped on the cottage where the four suspects were living in an overnight raid in the sleepy countryside hamlet south of Dunkirk in northern France. The Spanish interior ministry said in a statement Friday that French police had identified Alejandro Zobaran Arriola, 30, suspected to be the military chief of the armed Basque separatist group ETA, among four suspects arrested. It named ETA’s logistical chief Mikel Oroz Torrea as another of the suspects, identified by their fingerprints.
Locals said the four had been posing as tourists in the remote village. “They arrived almost two weeks ago. They said they were coming to visit the region, the coast and Belgium,” said Pierre Dufour, a hunter who lives a few hundred metres (yards) from the house where they were arrested. “They planned to stay three weeks and they paid for it all up front,” renting a cottage overlooking Willencourt, population 140. French sources close to the operation confirmed that four suspected ETA members had been arrested but could not confirm their identity.
