MADRID - Spain's interior minister said the suspected new military chief of ETA, Aitzol Iriondo, arrested in France Monday, may have been involved in the killing of two Spanish police officers in France last year.
Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Iriondo is believed to have taken over as military chief of the Basque separatist organisation when the former leader, Garikoitz Aspiazu, alias Txeroki, was arrested in France on November 17.
"He could be linked to the killing in Capbreton," Rubalcaba told a news conference.
Suspected ETA gunmen killed two undercover Spanish police officers in Capbreton, in France's southwestern Landes region, in December 2007.
Two of the alleged killers were arrested a few days after the attack. But the third assailant escaped and has never been identified.
A judge in Paris last month charged Txeroki with helping prepare the killings, but not with murder.
French anti-terrorism police arrested Iriondo Monday evening along with two other ETA suspects.
The men were carrying several revolvers and fake documents when they were nabbed on a street in the village of Gerde in southwest France.
"The investigations that followed the arrest of Txeroki made the arrests this evening possible," Rubalcaba said.
He said the other two held are believed to be Eneko Zarrabeitia Salterain and Aitor Artetxe Rodriguez, although this has yet to be confirmed.
He said Zarrabeitia belongs to ETA's "Cantabria commando" and fled to France in 2007, while Artetxe belonged to the "Vizcaya commando."
He also linked Iriondo to the killing of a Basque businessman on Wednesday.
The victim, Ignacio Uria Mendizabal, 71, was the head of a company, Altuna y Uria, involved in the construction of a high-speed rail network in the region -- a project opposed by ETA.
"It is not too bold to say that either Txeroki or Aitzol Iriondo were behind the order" to kill Uria, Rubalcaba added.
He warned ETA that any replacement for Iriondo would be hunted down.
"I don't know if any terrorist is thinking of taking over from Aitzol Iriondo, but I can assure them that, from this moment, we are looking for you," he said.
ETA, considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, is blamed for the deaths of 824 people in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings to carve a Basque homeland out of parts of northern Spain and southwestern France.
