Protests after ETA killing

ETA Urged to Call Truce

The Basque government in northern Spain has urged the separatist organisation ETA to follow the example of the IRA and declare a ceasefire.

The call came as tens of thousands attended church services across Spain in memory of the young politician, Miguel Angel Blanco, killed by ETA a week earlier.

The Basque Interior Minister, Juan Maria Atutxa, said an indefinite truce by ETA would allow "progress on the road to peace". The appeal was made shortly after the IRA announced it was calling a ceasefire from midday on Sunday.

Mr Atutxa said ETA was now faced with "an historic moment and a chance to give a future of peace and hope to this people."

The killing of Miguel Blanco, who had been held hostage by ETA, caused revulsion across Spain, culminating in huge rallies of protest.

This weekend, religious masses have been held throughout the country to mark the deadline ETA had set a week ago for the government to move all ETA prisoners to jails in the Basque region.

In the small southern town of Marinaleda, some 700 people extended a 24-hour hunger strike to protest against Blanco's kidnapping and murder.

Bells in hundreds of churches and town halls around the country are being rung to commemorate the deadline.

ETA, whose name is an acronym for Basque Homeland and Freedom, has killed nearly 800 people since it began campaigning for Basque independence in 1968.

Pro-ETA Website "Mailbombed" Off the Net

Outrage at the ETA killing has even been felt on the Internet. A website sympathetic to ETA has been suspended following a sustained campaign to "mailbomb" it.

The site, run by the US Institute for Global Communications, carried the Euskal Herria Journal, produced by a New-York based organisation supporting Basque independence in Spain and France.

It was forced to shut down after the site received a large volume of e-mails, designed to overload the computers.

"For the last week, IGC's system has suffered from organised, malicious attacks designed not to communicate with us, but simply to bring our servers to a standstill," said the Institute for Global Communications.

Hundreds of duplicate messages were sent over and over again, as well as huge message files full of rubbish or with one phrase repeated thousands of times. Many of the e-mails had either forged or no return addresses so that they could not be traced.

"We call on all those concerned that legal political speech can be forcibly censored by "mailbombing" attacks to protest the tactics used against us," said the IGC.