Posted on 07/24/2003 6:23:36 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
A Paris court on Wednesday sentenced seven key members of a Spanish Marxist guerrilla group held responsible for dozens of deaths to up to 10 years in prison on terror-related charges.
The court found Fernando Silva Sande, military chief of the outlawed GRAPO organisation, and historical leader Manuel Perez Martinez guilty of conspiracy with a terrorist group and handed them both jail terms of 10 years.
Listed by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organisation, GRAPO (the First of October Anti-fascist Resistance Group) is occasionally blamed for small bomb attacks and armed hold-ups in Spain. The U.S. State Department says it has killed over 90 people.
Two other GRAPO members, Jose Luis Elipe Lopez and Isabel Llaquet Baldellon, also received the maximum 10-year sentence, while Maria-Victoria Gomez Mendez, Jose Antonio Pena Quesada and Maria Rosario Llobregat Moreno were handed eight, six and three years respectively.
Lawyers for the defendants said they would all appeal.
"I find these sentences extremely heavy. My clients had no arms or explosives and they carried out no terrorist actions. They have been condemned because they were political thinkers," said Emmanuelle Hauser-Phelizon, lawyer for Pena and Llobregat.
The activists were arrested in 2000 after cooperation between French and Spanish police. Further arrests since then have left the clandestine group practically leaderless.
GRAPO was formed in 1975, the last year of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, as the armed wing of the then-illegal Spanish Communist Party. It resurfaced in 2000, blamed for killing two security guards during a botched armed robbery attempt on an armoured truck carrying an estimated $2 million.
A handful of sympathisers who turned out to support the activists chanted "Long live freedom", holding up clenched fists and shouting in Spanish that the French justice system had ruined their freedom to fight.
The U.S. State Department said GRAPO issued a statement following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States expressing satisfaction that "symbols of imperialist power" were decimated and affirming that "the war" had only just begun.
Marxist = Communist
Gratifying to see these Euro-Marxists crushed under the bootheel of the feared French justice system.
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