Four members of ETA confessed during the trial to having 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 were left their home in San Sebastian. with her 18 month old son on November 10, 2000.
At the hearing held this Monday at the National Court, the prosecutor maintained her request for 74 years and four months in prison for the members of the Gaua command of the terrorist group Imanol Miner Villanueva, Asier García Justo and Jon Zubiaurre and the member of the Donosti command Patxi Xabier Macazaga Azurmendi, the first three as material authors 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 They placed a flower pot on the doormat of the journalist couple’s house. with a fern in which the explosive device was placed with cables connected to the apartment door so that it would be activated when it was opened.
When Juan Palomo opened the door to leave the house with his wife and son, due to a device failure, the detonator did not activate the explosive. more than two kilos of dynamite with another two and a half kilos of shrapnel.
Civil Guard and Ertzaintza agents said that if the detonator had been activated, it would have had “some incalculable and enormous consequences” since the expansive wave would have affected a radius of seven meters only with the shrapnel 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 the Basque Country and settle in Madrid because if they continued there, they would both have to be permanently accompanied by two chaperones, 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 stay in the farthest room from the door.”
“My life has changed radically, we had to leave the Basque Country because it was not healthy for the child to go to the park with four escorts, how much it changed the lives of all the Basque journalists who were not in favor of ETA and its acolytes”, a- he pointed out.
He reported that some of his friends lost the baby they were expecting due to the impact of the news of the attack and stressed: “Twenty-four years later, I am still on medication and have undergone 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.
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