MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s High Court has convicted Mikel Carrera Sarobe, an ex-militant of the now disbanded Basque separatist group ETA, of shooting dead a prominent politician in 2001 and sentenced him to 30 years in prison, a court document showed.
Carrera, 51, who is already serving a long prison sentence in France for multiple killings, had been transferred to Spain earlier this year to be tried over the brutal murder in the northeastern city of Zaragoza.
Carrera, who was known within the ETA as “Ata”, shot 53-year-old Manuel Gimenez Abad, a regional leader of the conservative People’s Party as he was walking with his 17-year-old son to a soccer game on May 6, 2001.
The killing caused outrage in Spain.
The Madrid High Court said in its verdict, dated Sept. 18, that Carrera had shot Abad twice from behind before finishing him off on the ground with a bullet to the head.
He was also ordered to pay 250,000 euros ($266,075.00) to Abad’s relatives.
Carrera, who was arrested in France in 2010, has been transferred back to France where he will serve the remainder of his sentence there before going to a Spanish prison.
Even though ETA abandoned violence in 2011 and disbanded in 2018, many perpetrators of its crimes remain unpunished. This has created tension in Spanish society, now increasingly polarised between supporters of a unified state and those who seek more autonomy for Spain’s regions or even independence.
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(Reporting by Inti Landauro, editing by Andrei Khalip and Mark Heinrich)
