The National Court acquitted him and the Supreme Court annulled the decision. The same court rewrote the sentence and acquitted him again, but the Supreme Court annulled it again, this time ordering three different magistrates to repeat the trial.
ETA member Asier Eceiza was facing that second trial this Tuesday and has chosen to avoid it, recognizing the facts attributed to him by prosecutor Miguel Ángel Carballo with a somewhat lowering of the sentences. He will be sentenced to 182 years in prison compared to the 268 years requested in the initial indictment for two crimes of havoc and 14 attempted murders. The accusation refers to the attacks on hotels in Alicante and Benidorm in the summer of 2003.
In practice, neither this reduction in sentence nor the sentence itself will have hardly any practical impact for the accused. The prosecutor recalled that according to the rules of the Penal Code, the maximum limit of effective compliance is 20 years.
Furthermore, Eceiza was already considered guilty in the attack against the socialist councilor Juan Priede. Also then he conformed and accepted the facts in exchange for lowering the initial request of 28 years in prison to 19 years.
In the first acquittal ruling, the Court considered it proven that Eceiza had rented the rooms used by ETA, but not its direct participation in the attacks. The Supreme Court’s response was that “any prior activity that objectively facilitates criminal action, if carried out with the purpose of contributing to the desired result, is likely to merit the criminal reproach that the code assigns to those who collaborate in any way -necessary or not.” – with criminal activity”.
The TS considered that the Court’s ruling failed to clarify “whether the accused, when carrying out those actions, which, considered in themselves and taken from their context, are neutral, knew, even if in a generic way and without details, that they were directed “not to get reservations to enjoy a few days in a hotel or exclusively to spend a few weeks in Valencia, but to facilitate the perpetration of attacks of the type that actually occurred.” The new sentence did not clarify this either, according to the High Court, which ordered a repeat of the trial.
According to the facts that are accepted as proven, the terrorists placed explosive devices with between 10 and 12 kilos of chloratite and a timer in separate rooms of the Bahía de Alicante and Nadal hotels in Benidorm.
At around 11 a.m. on July 22, 2003, a call was received at the headquarters of the newspaper Gara in San Sebastián in which a man announced on behalf of ETA that the devices would explode at around 12:30 p.m.
In another call to the Levante newspaper, it was said that they would explode at 12, although whoever answered the phone did not understand the name of the hotel in Benidorm.
After the corresponding notices, a police eviction device was initiated from both hotels. Although the bomb warning received in Gara referred to 12:30 p.m., it was at 12:15 p.m. that the explosion occurred in the Benidorm hotel, which affected several agents who were inside and in adjacent buildings, and other people who were in the vicinity.
Previously, at 12:05 p.m., the device at the Bahía de Alicante hotel exploded in room 106 and at the same height in an adjacent building was located a Spanish teaching academy for foreigners that was in full activity, with no time left. to their eviction, the explosion affecting their facilities and injuring several people.
