SPAIN SAYS VENEZUELA TO COOPERATE WITH PROBE
By Ciaran Giles
AP
2.3.10
MADRID – Venezuela has pledged to cooperate with a Spanish court that
accuses the South American nation’s government of collaborating with
Basque separatist militants and Colombian rebels, the Spanish foreign
minister said Tuesday.
Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said he spoke with Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez and Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro on Monday and that
both denied the allegations and promised to investigate.
"They committed themselves to cooperate with Spanish authorities to
fully clear up this matter," Moratinos told reporters during a visit
to Yerevan, Armenia.
On Monday, Spanish Judge Eloy Velasco indicted six members of the
Basque group ETA, most of them exiled in Latin America, and seven
members of the Colombian rebel group FARC for a variety of crimes,
including plotting to kill former Colombian President Andres Pastrana
and the current president, Alvaro Uribe.
Velasco said a Spanish probe begun in 2008 turned up evidence of
"Venezuelan governmental cooperation" in the collaboration between
the two groups.
A Spanish Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press that
Spain would now wait for Venezuela to answer a court request for
more information to clear up the matter. He said allegations of
collaboration between ETA and the FARC were not new, but that the
idea that Venezuela’s government might be involved was.
Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday the allegations formed
part of what it called a campaign against the Chavez government.
ETA has been waging a violent campaign since the late 1960s to create
an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern
France. The FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have
been battling since 1964 to topple successive Colombian governments
and establish a Marxist-style state.
Both are classified as terrorist organizations by the European Union
and the United States.
Velasco identified suspected ETA member Arturo Cubillas Fontan as a key
figure in links between ETA and the FARC. The man lives in Venezuela,
has held a job in the Chavez government and may still have one,
the judge wrote.
Velasco said ETA and the FARC have been collaborating since 1993.
ETA members have received training or taught in FARC rebel camps,
and FARC members traveled to Spain to try to kill former Colombian
President Andres Pastrana and the current president, Alvaro Uribe,
with help from ETA, Velasco wrote.
The probe is based largely on e-mails that were in a computer used
by a FARC leader named Raul Reyes, who died in a Colombian military
raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador in March 2008.
Speaking from Colombia on Tuesday, Pastrana told Spain’s COPE radio the
matter demanded "a clear and concise answer from President Chavez’s
government about what happened in Venezuela with these men who have
been accused by the Spanish judge."
Associated Press writer Avet Demourian in Yerevan, Armenia, contributed
to this report.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
