The criticism of the PP to the transfer of ETA prisoners to Basque prisons has filled the glass of patience of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who this Thursday recalled that the government of José María Aznar brought ETA prisoners closer to the Basque Country when the gang killed and kidnapped and has reproached the PP for the use that, in his opinion, it makes "spurious and shameless" of the fight against terrorism.
After yesterday the Ministry of the Interior reported the imminent transfer of thirteen ETA members, including the former leaders of the gang Xabier Garcia Gaztelu, alias Txapote, and Henri Parot, and the PP charged against the measure by considering it as a transfer to EH Bildu for his support for the Government, Sánchez gave his answer this morning in an interview on Ser. "The PP, when it governed, brought hundreds of ETA prisoners closer to the Basque Country while ETA killed and had people kidnapped", recalled the Chief Executive who has lamented that "unfortunately" what has been seen in the last 11 years "even after the disappearance of ETA" is "the spurious and shameless use by the PP of the anti-terrorist policy".
The Chief Executive has assured that the Socialist Party has never done this when it has been in the opposition, neither with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero nor later with him, and that the PSOE "has always forged great agreements around the fight against terrorism, both in Euskadi as in jihadist terrorism".
Sánchez has emphasized that "nothing is changing", but that these prisoners "are going to serve their sentences in full" and clarified that what the Government is doing with these actions is "complying with prison legislation". And he has once again reproached the PP for using "anything, even a success of Spanish democracy such as peace and the end of violence to pierce or try to undermine a government like the one I preside over."
Specifically, Moncloa sources pointed out yesterday that between 1996 and 2004, in full activity of the gang, the governments of José María Aznar ordered 574 transfers of ETA prisoners to prisons near the Basque Country and between 2011 and 2018, Mariano Rajoy did the same on 229 occasions. The same sources indicated that then the PP did not inform public opinion of these transfers, which the government of Pedro Sánchez does "providing complete information to the victims and, later, issuing press releases with each of the transfers."
The sources recalled that serving the sentence close to the social and family environment is not a prison benefit but rather a right of all inmates and that once ETA has disappeared "this right cannot be violated, which also in no case implies a reduction in sentence Nor nothing alike".
