Two ETA suspects arrested in France after shooting at police

A man and a woman suspected of belonging to ETA were arrested on Saturday night a few hours after shooting and wounding a gendarme at a checkpoint in La Creuse, French authorities said.

The Spanish Interior Ministry confirmed the identity of the pair as Oier Gómez Mielgo and Itziar Moreno, who were both on the police's most-wanted list.

Gómez Mielgo had managed to escape a previous checkpoint in France on March 21, and is suspected of overseeing the setting up of an ETA bomb-making facility in Óbidos, Portugal.

Moreno is suspected of involvement in a car bomb attack against regional television and radio offices in Bilbao in December 2008.

The first armed incident involving ETA and law enforcement officials since the terrorists declared a ceasefire on January 10 was a clear opportunity for Bildu - the Basque radical separatist wing's latest attempt to run in local elections on May 22 after a previous party, Sortu, was declared illegal by the courts - to publicly reject ETA violence, as the law demands. But Bildu leaders merely "rejected the incident."

The Basque chief of interior affairs, Rodolfo Ares, said "if they want the disappearance of all violence, particularly ETA's, as their charter stated, Sortu need to join the democrats and demand that the terrorist group disappear definitively, without any conditions or possibility of going back."