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Leaders of the banned Basque separatist party Batasuna arrested this week for allegedly seeking closer cooperation with its armed wing ETA were brought Sunday before Spain's highest-profile judge.
The 19 senior members of the Batasuna party and four others arrested with them last Thursday arrived in two convoys at Madrid's law courts for their appearance before judge Baltasar Garzon.
Prosecutors sought prison sentences for the first 11 people who appeared before the judge on Sunday, including Juan Jose Petrikorena, responsible for Batasuna's communication.
All 23 were apprehended during a Batasuna meeting which violated an order suspending the party. Garzon was expected to order some or all of them into detention pending further investigation and possibly trial.
Spanish newspapers reported Sunday that police arrested the group after learning it was in the process of aligning itself to the violent policies of ETA, which in June ended a 15-month ceasefire.
A Spanish legal source, declining to be named, said Garzon decided to hit Batasuna's leaders "to avoid the reorganisation" of the party after the ceasefire broke.
One of Spain's biggest newspapers, El Pais, said "Batasuna was going to bring back an internal structure to better embrace the violent strategy of ETA after the latter's breaking of its ceasefire on June 5."
The left-wing daily, which is close to Spain's Socialist government, said the assertion was based on documents seized by police following the arrests.
The arrests triggered unrest in Spain's northern Basque region in the form of street protests and firebomb attacks on a post office, a courthouse, a municipal building and a bus.
A Batasuna leader who was not arrested, Pernando Barrena, on Saturday said the arrests were "a declaration of war". Overnight Saturday, further violence erupted. In Bilbao, youths set fire to several rubbish bins and threw petrol bombs against cash machines. In Navarra, banks and a trade union office were also targeted by Molotov cocktails.
Spain's government has taken a hardened stance against ETA since the militant group ended its ceasefire after 15 months, with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero rejecting any negotiations.
The group - listed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States - is blamed for the deaths of 819 people during almost four decades of fighting for its cause. Batasuna, which has Marxist-Leninist leanings, has been banned as a party since 2003 for refusing to condemn violence and cut its links to ETA.
The detained leaders face charges related to Garzon's investigation into those links, especially the party's suspected financing of ETA's activities. According to El Pais, an internal Batasuna memo found by police spoke of "justifying the policy of violence and of collaborating to create a climate of instability."
Another paper, ABC, reported much the same information, saying Batasuna had been seeking to establish "a political strategy" to legitimise ETA's attacks, and had been preparing to bring radical figures into its leadership. The daily El Mundo said the interior ministry had gathered up many clues pointing in the same direction.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2007

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