Spanish police have arrested four suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA and seized about 200kg of explosives in a major crackdown on the armed group.
It was the biggest blow to ETA since it declared a ‘permanent and general ceasefire’ in January.
ETA is responsible for more than four decades of bombings and shootings as part of its fight for a homeland independent of Spain.
Spanish authorities has promised to pursue the security clampdown against ETA, which it holds responsible for 829 killings.
Police detained the four suspects in night raids in Vizcaya, northern Spain, after several months of investigations, Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.
‘We found an important quantity of explosives, around 200kg, as well as various types of material to make bombs,’ Mr Rubalcaba told a Madrid news conference.
Investigators were now trying to clear up a series of unsolved attacks in Vizcaya over the past years, he said.
ETA declared on 10 January a ceasefire to be verified by the international community.
But Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero rejected the declaration, saying he wanted nothing less than ETA's dissolution, and the authorities have vowed to hunt down ETA members.
‘The government's anti-terrorist policy has not changed, we have not budged it by a single comma because ETA has not definitively abandoned violence and until it does so police will carry on their work,’ Mr Rubalcaba said.
The Spanish authorities believe they have crippled ETA's operational capacity with dozens of arrests made in cooperation with forces in other countries, particularly France.
ETA has not staged an attack on Spanish soil since August 2009.
The latest raids were born out of information obtained in the successive arrests in France of suspected ETA military leaders, Mr Rubalcaba said: Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, known as Txeroki, in November 2008; and Mikel Kabikoitz Karrera Sarobe, known as Ata, in May 2010.
Mr Rubalcaba gave no further details of the latest arrests.
But Spanish media quoted anti-terrorist sources as saying the Civil Guard police had arrested two men and two women.
