Kimberley Mannion
THE Basque seperatist group ETA is set to be removed from the United States foreign terrorist blacklist.
Under the full name of Basque Fatherland and Liberty, ETA ran a campaign of bombings and assassinations which killed more than 800 people with the goal of independence from Spain for the northern region of the Basque Country.
The US added ETA to its foreign terrorist blacklist in 1997.
The US State Department has notified Congress of the coming moves.
ETA is among five terrorist groups from across the world that will be dropped from the blacklist in a five-yearly review which asses whether the group is still active, whether they have committed attacks in the past five years, and whether they remain a threat to US national security.
A ceasefire was declared by ETA in 2010 and the group disbanded after the trial and arrests of its final leaders in 2018.
The State Department insisted that changes to a group’s status ´does not reflect any change in policy towards the past activities of any of these organisations.´
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