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Basques mourn murdered media bossMADRID, Spain -- Police in Spain are hunting the killers of a newspaper executive shot dead in a hospital car park. The killing of Santiago Oleaga Elejabarrieta is being blamed on Basque separatist group ETA, although no claim of responsibility has been made. Oleaga, 54, was shot seven times, including three times in the head, in a hospital car park lot in San Sebastian in the northern Basque region on Thursday. A car believed to have been used and then abandoned by the killers was later found on fire after apparently being blown up. At midday on Thursday, workers in Madrid and the Basque Country paused for five minutes of silence as a mark of respect. The incident is the first killing since regional elections earlier this month showed waning support for ETA's violent methods.
The political party Euskal Herritarrok (EH) -- widely seen as ETA's political arm -- suffered a setback, losing half its 14 seats after its percentage of the popular vote plunge to about 10 percent. Oleaga, married with two children, worked as financial director of the leading regional newspaper El Diaro Vasco (The Basque Daily). El Diaro Vasco has been strongly critical of the ETA and the separatist movement, and police immediately pinned the killing on the guerrilla group. Following the poll, a journalist was injured in an attack attributed to ETA. Gorka Landaburu, who works for a Madrid-based national news weekly magazine, Cambio 16 and a television station, Canal Sur TV, was injured by a bomb blast at his home in Zarautz,. Last year another reporter was shot dead and many others are now forced to have bodyguards. Freimut Duve, the media freedom representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, urged an end to what he dubbed "ethnic radicalism." "It is poisoning the professional standards of journalism when fear for your life or that of your relatives is influencing your reporting and editorial decisions," he said. Thursday's attack was immediately condemned by politicians in Madrid and in the Basque region. "By killing, ETA wants to recover what it lost in the May 13 election, but Basque society has given a strong message: Stop killing once and for all," Basque President-elect Juan Jose Ibarretxe said. ETA, which means Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language, has been blamed for 31 murders since January 2000 and about 800 since 1968. |
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