Dirty war is back

The cases of illegal kidnappings, tortures, beatings and even one "disappeared" are back to the daily account of Basque news. The last is a construction worker, a formerly imprisoned activist, Alain Berasategi, who was kidnapped for some 7 hours at a forest at Irunberri, Navarre, and tortured there.

Berasategi was lured into the ambush by a call asking for a budget for a supposed reform of an old abandoned farmhouse. When he arrived there, 10 masked and heavily armed men, probably police officers.

He was tortured with the method known as "the bag", where they put a plastic bag on your head, restricting at will your ability to breath and bringing you repeatedly to terrorific near death situations. He was also beaten and threatened for all the time he remained captive.

One of the captors, apparently the leader, was as arrogant as to remove his mask while making threats, specifically that they had police evidence against him that they would use if he did not cooperate. They even showed him the police dossier against him, all of which makes very credible the suspicion that they were police agents.

He was only set free when he agreed to fix another date to collaborate with the agents.

Alain Berasategi was one of the many people inprisoned by Neoinquisition judge Baltasar Garzón, in the series of political trials that have affected Basque politics in the last years. He was set free without charges 10 months later.

This is not the first case of this kind:

In December 2008, Juan Mari Mujika was kidnapped by people claiming to be French police agents at Donapaleu. He was brought to a mountain area and threatened and pressed there. They told him that in the past "they would have just put a bullet in his head but that nowadays they prefered to lenghthen his suffering".

In May this year, Lander Fernández was kidnapped, beaten and threatened several times in his neighbourhood of Bilbao by people claiming to be police agents. Until he decided to denounce it to the tribunals. After that he was arrested and jailed and now is on bail waiting for trial.

In April, ETA reported that their member Jon Anza had gone missing. It is known that he took a rain at Baiona in the direction to Tolousse, where he had an arranged meeting of the organization. He has never been seen again. Probably he refused to cooperate with police and was simply killed.

Source: Gara.
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