Five people, including a green activist, a winemaker and two journalists, have been arrested in the French Basque Country in what the authorities have dubbed a "heavy blow" to Basque separatist group Eta. But activists say the raid was a political move to prevent the destruction of part of the organisation's arsenal, reports RFI.
A "significant seizure of arms, explosives and munitions" was made in the raid by French and Spanish police on a property in Louhossoa, near Bayonne, on Friday night, the Interior Ministry announced.
But the five people arrested were not known Eta members.
They were Jean-Noël Etcheverry, the head of an ecologist group, Michel Berhocoirigoin, a former head of the Basque Country chamber of agriculture, Michel Bergougnian, a member of a winemaker's cooperative, and two freelance journalists, Béatrice Haran-Molle and Stéphane Etchegaray.
And police sources who leaked the names to news agencies made a mistake, at first claiming that the honorary president of France's Human Rights League, Michel Tubiana, was among those detained.
Tubiana, a lawyer, contacted the media to explain that he had planned to be there but could not go.
The group's intention was to destroy the arms and then hand them over to the authorities in an attempt to jumpstart the stalled peace process between Eta and the French and Spanish governments, he claimed.
In a joint letter, dated 25 October and published on the Mediabask website on Friday evening, he, Etcheverry and Berhocoirigoin said that the ordnance represented "about 15 percent of Eta's arsenal" and that they hoped that its destruction would "contribute to a democratic future without violence for the Basque Country".