Anger as Eta chief escapes from French police cell

A senior leader of Eta, the Basque terrorist group, has escaped from a police cell in Bayonne, south-west France, sparking an internal police investigation.

Ibon Fernandez Iradi, 33, thought to be one of two acting leaders of the separatist group, climbed through a skylight and scaled a high wall to escape from the police headquarters on Saturday, hours before he was to be transferred to Paris.

He had been captured by French police on Thursday in an operation described by Spanish authorities as a serious blow to Eta's capacity to continue its 34-year-old campaign for Basque independence from Spain and France.

An internal police investigation unit was drafted to Bayonne yesterday as police and gendarmes searched for their ex-prisoner.

The internal investigation was expected to ask why such an important captive was still in a low-security cell three days after his arrest. It will also ask why he was kept in a room with a skylight and why his disappearance was not noticed for several hours.

The escape is the latest in a series of blunders involving prisoners in custody in France.

A psychologically disturbed Italian who attempted to hijack a plane from Bologna to Paris last month committed suicide in his cell near Lyons on 6 December. A man who killed eight councillors in the Paris suburb of Nanterre in Marchkilled himself at Paris police headquarters the day after his arrest.

Mr Iradi, known as "Susper", is thought to be the head of Eta's recruitment, training, logistics and planning organisation. Since the arrest of the high command of Eta in Spain in September, he is thought to have taken over as one of the two senior leaders. Spanish authorities believe he was also directly involved in terrorist acts, some of them fatal. He is said to have been part of the "Buruntza" or "Donosti" group which launched a failed attack on the leadership of the governing centre-right People's Party at the Zarautz cemetery in Spain in January.

Mr Iradi is wanted in France for seriously wounding a gendarme last year. He and his girlfriend Beltzane Obanos, 22, were arrested near the village of St Martin de Seignanx while driving a car with false number-plates on Thursday morning. Their capture triggered a series of raids in south-western France in which eight other people were arrested.

The other Eta prisoners were taken to Paris under heavy guard yesterday. They included Balbino Saez Olarra, suspected by Spanish authorities of involvement in a car bomb attack near the Bernabeu stadium in Madrid in May, which injured 17 people a few hours before a Real Madrid-Barcelona football match.

The arrest of Mr Iradi came two days after civil guards stopped two suspected Eta members on their way to Madrid with a car full of explosives, apparently destined for a Christmas campaign to bomb department stores in the capital. One of the suspects fled, but was later arrested in the north coast city of San Sebastian, while the other was injured in a shoot-out and taken to hospital.

A Spanish judge ruled yesterday that both should be jailed unconditionally, pending trial. A civil guardsman was killed in the shoot out 25 miles from Madrid

Tens of thousands of people marched through Bilbao yesterday demanding Eta be disbanded. Police said at least 60,000 took part in the rally organised by the regional government, run by the moderate Basque Nationalist Party.

The party of Jose Maria Aznar, the Prime Minister, boycotted the march, which it rejected as a tactic by Juan Jose Ibarretxe, the Basque President. He is accused of being too soft on Eta and its political wing, Batasuna.