French police arrested Wednesday a top member of the Basque separatist group ETA wanted in connection with a planned missile attack on then Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar in 2001, officials said. Juan Maria Mugica was detained near the city of Pau in southwestern France in a joint French-Spanish operation, Spain's interior ministry said in a statement.
Police arrested him as he was driving a car in the town of Mauleon, a French police source said. Mugica was not armed and he offered no resistance, the source added. Mugica had escaped a police raid in 2010 in Lizarta in Spain's Basque region. The operation dismantled an ETA cell, of which he was a member, suspected of transporting material for attacks.
Leaders of the armed Basque separatist group had ordered the cell to fire a missile at a plane that was transporting Aznar to Bilbao, the interior ministry said. The cell transported the missile from France to the Spanish town of Hernani but the attack never took place. Mugica has since 2010 been the target of a European arrest warrant for "membership in ETA and the illegal possesion of weapons and explosives with the aim of carrying out a criminal act."
Aznar, who served as conservative Popular Party prime minister between 1996 and 2004, was frequently an ETA target. He survived an ETA car bombing in Madrid in 1995 when he was leader of the opposition. The car's shielding protected him but one woman was killed and another 15 people were wounded. ETA announced in October last year the "definitive" end to a campaign of bombings and shootings to try to carve out an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France. But the group has not bowed to Spanish and French demands that it disarm and disband. Blamed for more than 800 killings in four decades of its campaign, the group has not committed an attack on Spanish soil since August 2009.
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