Venezuela hands ETA fugitives over to Cuba

Three ETA terrorists fleeing Cuba and arrested last Thursday by Venezuelan officials when their boat ran aground on a Caribbean archipelago resort have been deported back to the island, according to informed sources in the fight against terrorism.

The three ETA members, along with a Haitian and a Cape Verde national, entered Venezuela illegally on a Spanish flagged vessel. Venezuelan authorities opted to return them by plane to their country of origin, the sources said on Saturday.

The ETA members were identified as Elena Bárcena Argüelles, Francisco Javier Pérez Lekue and José Ignacio Etxarte Urbieta.

They were arrested along with two other men: a Haitian citizen named Sadir Allyn and another from Cape Verde, named Carlos Méndes, who was the skipper. Apparently, the boat, Silver Clouds, left Haiti and ran aground in Los Roques - a Venezuelan national park archipelago 156 kilometers north of the country's central coast - after suffering mechanical problems. The ETA members' plight began in Cuba last month and they stayed in Haiti for an undetermined period of time before resuming their journey, which accidentally ended in Venezuela.

After they found themselves stuck and were being aided, authorities discovered through their documentation that the boat had entered the country's waters illegally and did not have port-of-call permission in Venezuela. The case was reported to immigration authorities and the five were sent to the Coast Guard's command port in La Guaira on the mainland.

The three ETA members had been living in Cuba for more than 20 years and were not allowed to leave the country. Bárcena, aka Tigresa, and Perez, known as Luke, penned a letter last February to Basque media sympathetic to the pro-independence struggle accusing the Castro regime of being "jailers." They charged that Havana authorities are not sticking to a 1984 accord in which the Castro regime promised not to do anything to prevent ETA exiles from leaving the island.

Of the three, only Etxarte Urbieta has an open case before the Spanish High Court for allegedly taking part, with five other ETA members and six guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in joint terrorism activities. Their plans included the assassination of then-Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and other Colombian politicians visiting Spain. According to investigators, the court has evidence that shows strong cooperation between ETA and the FARC dating back to 1993.

For her part, Foreign Minister Trinidad Jiménez said Saturday in Sopot, Poland, where she was attending an informal EU meeting, that Spain has "perfect and precise knowledge" about the situation of ETA refugees in Cuba. Asked about the three, Jiménez revealed that it was "the Cuban government that reported their escape, which led to the arrests."