Four ETA prisoners confessed during the trial that they had carried out the attack with an explosive device in an attempt to assassinate journalists Aurora Intxausti, of El País, and Juan Palomo, of Antena 3, while They left their house in Donostia with their son, aged 18 months, on November 10, 2000. During the hearing held this Monday at the National Court, the prosecutor maintained his request of 74 years and four months in prison for the members at the time. The Gaua commando of the terrorist group Imanol Miner Villanueva, Asier García Justo and Jon Zubiaurre and the member of the Donosti commando Patxi Xabier Macazaga Azurmendi, the first three as material perpetrators and the last for having given the order to commit it.
However, he indicated that the maximum legal limit applicable is 30 years in prison for each and that in fact the four defendants are free after having served this sentence in connection with other ETA cases in which they were condemned. During her report, the prosecutor recalled that the terrorists had placed on the doormat of the journalist couple’s house a pot with a fern in which the explosive device was placed with cables connected to the door of the apartment to activated once opened. according to Efe.
When Juan Palomo opened the door to leave the house with his wife and son, due to a breakdown in the device, the detonator did not activate the explosive, more than two kilos of dynamite with two other kilos and a half of shrapnel. Civil Guard and Ertzaintza agents said that if the detonator had been activated, it would have had “incalculable and enormous consequences” since the shock wave would have affected a radius of seven meters which, with the shrapnel of shells that they introduced, would have caused the death of the couple and their son.
Juan Palomo said that that day, he opened the door of his house around 8 a.m. to go to work with his wife, who was going to take their son to daycare. “When I opened the door it looked like a firecracker and I saw a big pot stuck on it, so I told Aurora to go inside with the child and I called the Ertzaintza,” a- he added.
He commented that the attack represented a “total change” and “marked” their lives since they were forced to leave Euskadi and settle in Madrid since if they continued there they would both have to be accompanied at all times by two bodyguards, each with a child of one and a half years old. “My father, who suffered from heart disease and died two years later, during his funeral in Bilbao I was surrounded by ertzainas and every time we went to see our families in the Basque Country we were accompanied by bodyguards,” he said.
Aurora Intxausti pointed out that when she saw the flower pot with the cable come out, she began to lose control. “I entered a nebula in which we don’t know how time works, the child started crying so I took some Legos to entertain him and the Ertaintza told us to go to the furthest room away from the door.” “My life changed radically, we had to leave Euskadi because it was not healthy for the child to go to the park with four escorts, just like the lives of all the journalists in Euskadi who were not in favor of ETA and its acolytes has changed,” he stressed. She said that some of her friends lost the baby they were expecting because of the consequences of the announcement of the attack and stressed: “twenty. -four years later, I am still under treatment and have been subjected to psychiatric and psychological treatment.”
The prosecutor and the lawyer prosecuting the victims requested the payment of various compensations of more than 200,000 euros to the couple for the consequences and damage caused.
