The 1977 law granted amnesty for 66 ETA crimes, including the one recognized by 'Josu Ternera' against the mayor of Galdakao

With this law, 89 terrorists were released, but another 18,000 common and political prisoners had already benefited from previous pardons.

MADRID, 16 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The 1977 Amnesty Law was applied to 66 ETA crimes, including the one recognized in a documentary that will be screened at the San Sebastián Festival by José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, 'Josu Ternera', in which the mayor of Galdakao was murdered, Victor Legorburu.

According to the count carried out by the Victims of Terrorism Association (AVT), in six of the 66 amnestied cases there is a sentence of conviction for those responsible, in 32 those responsible were identified but could not be tried and in two cases the perpetrators would have died. .

Furthermore, in another 26 procedures, information was not yet available and said summaries were being located in the military archives and in the territorial judicial archive of Madrid, as recalled by the AVT in November 2021 before the mission of European parliamentarians that traveled to Spain to promote the clarification of the ETA attacks without a known perpetrator.

Among the attacks for which there was no information about its authorship or it was partial is that of the mayor of Galdakao murdered in 1976, Víctor Legorburu. 'Josu Ternera' has now claimed authorship of the documentary in which he has been interviewed by journalist Jordi Évole and whose premiere will take place at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

'Josu Ternera' was never prosecuted and was acquitted by the Amnesty Law of 1977. The victim was 63 years old, married and had two children, when he was murdered by ETA while walking with his escort near the entrance to his own home.

According to information from the AVT, the ETA crimes amnestied by the 'forgiveness law' in the transition from the dictatorship to democracy include the crimes committed by the terrorist group since the attack in 1968 that ended the life of the guard. of traffic José Antonio Pardines to the one perpetrated on June 22, 1977 against Javier de Ybarra, who was a director of the Bank of Vizcaya, as well as president of the Provincial Council of Vizcaya and mayor of Bilbao.

In its report to the delegation of MEPs, the AVT defended the police and judicial work to clarify the 300 unsolved ETA crimes, highlighting that practically half of them were perpetrated by the terrorist organization between 1979 and 1980, and that "not necessarily "The lack of conviction is due to "an error in the system or a failure to comply with the State's obligation to investigate."

"We cannot ignore that in those years ETA attacked every 3 or 4 days and mainly against members of the Armed Forces and the State Security Forces and Bodies," recalled the president of the AVT, Maite Araluce.

ETA announced the end of the attacks in 2011 and in 2018 'Josu Ternera' himself called for its dissolution, before being arrested by the Civil Guard in the French Alps in May 2019. The AVT took stock of the ten years without attacks to highlight that around 150 judicial proceedings had been reopened, that is, half of the cases that were unresolved. Twenty of the cases had gone to trial, 15 of which had been resolved with conviction of the perpetrators.

The Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism has also analyzed this issue in its 2021 report 'Justice pending: unclarified ETA murders', noting that there were 74 murders attributed to ETA between 1968 and 1977, although "in six Of them the perpetrators were tried and sentenced and in three others there was no occasion, as the terrorists who committed the crimes had died.

"This lack of clarification causes the victims, first of all, relevant moral damage derived from the difficulty of closing the grief caused by the crime and, furthermore, economic damage because the compensation provided by law in cases in which it is not sentence is usually lower than that established by judicial resolutions," stated the Memorial Center report, which, in turn, referred to the investigations of the Victims Foundation and the book 'Broken Lives'.

The Amnesty Law of 1977, unlike the rest of the pardon measures that had taken place since Franco's death, also included forgiveness for prisoners with blood crimes and amnesty for all regime officials who may have committed crimes. acts of "institutional violence."

With the entry into force of the 1977 law there were only 89 prisoners with blood crimes linked to terrorist gangs, the majority from GRAPO and ETA. In fact, nearly 18,000 prisoners, including ordinary and political prisoners, including terrorists, had already benefited from various pardon measures approved since the royal pardon of November 1975 until October 17, 1977, the date on which the Amnesty Law.

The data has been compiled by the CCOO May Day Foundation, as explained to Europa Press by its secretary and Doctor in Contemporary History, José Babiano. For its part, the data recorded by the newspaper 'El País' indicated a total of 89 terrorists released from prison, of which 53 were from GRAPO; 23 from ETA and 12 from FRAP, among other groups. The newspaper 'YA' specified that 85 were preventive prisoners and there were only 4 convicted.

Patxo Unzueta also addressed this issue in the book 'Memory of the Transition', stating that the pardon measures between 1975 and 1977 favored 400 Basque prisoners, of which 250 were convicted of terrorism. According to his information, the 1977 amnesty only benefited 23 ETA prisoners, although it also allowed many ETA members who were on the run at the time and who continued with the campaign of attacks now in democracy to re-enter the ranks of the band.