Basque separatist leader jailed in Spain

Spanish judges sent the Basque separatist movement's most prominent politician to prison Friday on a terrorism charge, offering another sign of apparent retaliation by the government over the armed group ETA calling off a cease-fire.

Arnaldo Otegi, the 48-year-old leader of the outlawed Batasuna party, was arrested as he walked to a news conference in San Sebastian and was jailed in the Basque city. The Supreme Court had rejected his appeal of a conviction and 15-month sentence handed down last year.

Batasuna called Otegi's arrest an act of "maximum gravity," saying the government of Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had silenced the independence movement's chief representative.

Otegi was found guilty by a lower court of defending terrorism _ a crime in Spain _ in remarks at a 2003 rally marking the 25th anniversary of an ETA leader's death.

In a nearly identical case in March, however, prosecutors dropped the charges at the last minute and let Otegi go free, raising the possibility that the government was acting against him because ETA announced Tuesday it was ending its 15-month-old cease-fire.

Three members of the militant group were arrested Thursday in southwestern France and treatment of another prominent ETA figure has also changed since the group's announcement.

Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos, convicted of killing 25 people in a string of ETA attacks, was sent back to jail Wednesday after recovering in a hospital from a 114-day hunger strike stemming from a new conviction over newspaper articles he wrote that were deemed to be terrorist threats.

When it moved de Juana Chaos from jail to the hospital in March, the government had said it was acting for humanitarian reasons and would consider house arrest for the rest of his term once he recovered.

At the time, the prime minister was desperate to keep alive a peace process in which he had begun to negotiate with ETA, only to see the group explode a bomb in December that killed two people in Madrid. Following the bombing, ETA insisted the truce still stood.

This week, however, after ETA announced it was breaking the cease-fire, the government said there was no way de Juana Chaos was going home.

The ruling against Otegi was sure to infuriate the Basque independence movement, but a political expert in the northern region said he did not think it would accelerate any violence planned by ETA.

"I imagine whatever plans they have made are already made and the orders given. In general, within ETA these things are not done overnight," analyst Javier Ortiz said in a telephone interview.