A newspaper executive was shot dead in Spain's northern Basque region on Thursday in the first killing blamed on the armed Basque separatist group ETA since crucial Basque parliamentary elections earlier this month.
"This is certainly the work of ETA," a spokesman for the regional police told Reuters.
Santiago Oleaga Elejabarrieta, 54 years old, was shot three times in the head at the car park of a hospital in San Sebastian, officials said.
Oleaga, married with two children, worked as financial director of leading regional newspaper El Diaro Vasco (The Basque Daily), the newspaper said.
With this killing, ETA has been blamed for 31 murders since January 2000 and about 800 since 1968 in a campaign to carve out an independent Basque homeland from Basque-speaking regions of northern Spain and southern France.
It typically targets local politicians, members of the security forces and, recently, journalists, usually with bombs or gunshots in the back of the head. A week before the Basque elections on May 6, a ruling party senator was gunned down in northern Aragon region.
Thursday's attack drew immediate condemnation from politicians in Madrid and in the semiautonomous Basque region.
"In the name of parliament let me express once again rejection and repulsion toward the terrorist group ETA, which seeks to impose its ideas through violence and fascist methods that have been eradicated from Europe for many years," said Madrid parliamentary president Luisa Fernanda Rudi.
Shortly after the shooting, a bomb exploded in a car parked in a neighborhood of San Sebastian. Police said they suspected the car was used in the attack and that ETA was destroying evidence.
On Wednesday, police near Bilbao detonated a bomb that appeared to have been planted by ETA after a university security guard spotted a suspect device attached to his car -- MADRID (Reuters)
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