The Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court has rejected Dignity and Justice’s request to view the interview with the former head of ETA José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, Josu Ternera, to check if it includes any crime of terrorist glorification or humiliation of the victims.
In his conversation with the journalist Jordi Évole, Josu Ternera acknowledges his intervention in the 1976 murder of the mayor of Galdácano (Vizcaya) Víctor Legorburu, a crime for which he was never prosecuted and which was archived by the Amnesty Law of 1977.
The response to the victims’ association states that there is “no indication” that the interview that will be shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival includes any criminal activity. The letter from the lieutenant prosecutor of the Court, Marta Durántez, also considers that acting in this case would imply “prior censorship” and a “prospective investigation”, both prohibited in the Constitution.
“Taking into account the constitutional right to freedom of the press and the justification that must be required for the possible limitation of said right, which in no case can be based on hypotheses or assumptions of the commission of a certain crime, lacking any indication that leads to such a conclusion, being a prospective investigation based on the circumstances of the person interviewed […] it is necessary to issue a decree initiating and archiving these proceedings, since the reported facts do not constitute any criminal offense and there is no access to the interested request for prior viewing of the interview,” concludes the Prosecutor’s Office led by Jesús Alonso.
In its letter to the Prosecutor’s Office, the association led by Daniel Portero demanded “that the State Attorney General’s Office carry out a visualization of that report prior to its public broadcast” to “verify if a crime could be committed in that report.”
The letter recalled that Josu Ternera is “a terrorist with an active judicial process and to whom the Prosecutor’s Office charges 11 crimes of completed murder and another 88 attempted murders (as many as those injured in the Zaragoza attack) and requests a sentence for him.” of 2,354 years in prison”.
The former ETA leader, arrested in 2019, is currently awaiting the final decision of the French Justice on his surrender to Spain to be tried for the car bomb attack against the Zaragoza barracks.
According to El Correo, in the documentary Don’t Call Me Ternera, a police officer who tried to protect the mayor of Galdácano is shown the images in which the ETA member acknowledges his involvement in the crime. Three members of ETA were prosecuted for Legorburu’s murder, but not Josu Ternera. The investigation determined that two more “unidentified” people had also participated. No one was convicted because the attack was affected by the Amnesty Law in 1977.