ETA Is Blamed for a Killing in Spain That Curtails Election Campaigning

By VICTORIA BURNETT and ELAINE SCIOLINO

MADRID — Spain’s two main political parties abruptly curtailed campaigning for Sunday’s general election after a gunman suspected of belonging to the Basque militant group ETA killed a former city councilman in northern Spain on Friday.

The attack and the ensuing disruption of the campaign were particularly disturbing for Spain because of their timing, just short of the fourth anniversary of the March 11, 2004, Islamist bombing of the Madrid commuter train system, which left 191 people dead three days before Spain’s last general election.

Then, the conservative government’s insistence that ETA was responsible for one of Europe’s deadliest terrorist attacks — despite mounting evidence to the contrary — angered voters who felt that they had been misled. They turned out in record numbers to elect the Socialist contender, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, as prime minister.

“Today, terrorists tried to interfere in the peaceful demonstration of the will of the people as they go to the polls,” Mr. Zapatero said during a televised statement. “We will not permit it today. We will never permit it.”

The slain man, Isaías Carrasco, 42, a former Socialist representative and father of three, was shot several times in the torso and neck at close range as he left his apartment in the working class town of Arrasate, according to Spanish authorities. Local press reports said that Mr. Carrasco, who was a councilman until last year, worked in a highway tollbooth.

A man wearing a false beard shot Mr. Carrasco before fleeing in a gray car, leaving the victim’s wife and daughter screaming “Daddy!” and “Murderer!” as they bent over his body, according to news service reports and a witness’s account broadcast on CNN’s Spanish language service.

In a televised briefing, Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba blamed a lone ETA shooter for the killing. “ETA has killed a Socialist former councilman,” Mr. Rubalcaba said, calling the shooting a “vile and cowardly act.”

Mr. Rubalcaba, who said last month that he expected ETA to try to stage an attack before the election, did not offer any evidence for his claim that it was responsible for Mr. Carrasco’s death.

Neither Mr. Rubalcaba nor any other Spanish official explained why ETA would have singled out a little-known former local official.

But Kepa Aulestia, a newspaper columnist and former member of ETA, said that Mr. Carrasco would have been an easy target.

“It was clear that ETA wanted to get someone during this campaign and it managed to do that today, probably because it managed to catch someone who was undefended and with no bodyguard,” Mr. Aulestia said in a telephone interview from Bilbao.

Mr. Zapatero cut short a campaign rally in southern Spain and canceled a final campaign appearance scheduled for Friday night in the Madrid suburb of Leganés. The conservative candidate, Mariano Rajoy, canceled rallies in Seville and Madrid.

The decision to halt campaigning, although imposed only hours before it was to end at midnight, was a signal of how large the Madrid bombings and their aftermath loom in the country’s consciousness. The attack on Friday also served as a reminder of one of the most controversial chapters of Mr. Zapatero’s term — his failed attempt to broker peace with ETA after the group declared a cease-fire in March 2006.

What began as a day in which Spanish airwaves were dominated by jubilant politicians on the campaign trail became a series of dramatic and bleak images: The Spanish-language CNN station filled the screen with a photograph of Mr. Carrasco, smiling and sporting a silver earring in one ear. CNN also showed masked Basque antiterrorism police surrounding the scene of the killing and bloody images of destruction in ETA bombings that have taken place over more than a decade.

In an apparent show of unity, Mr. Rajoy, leader of the opposition Popular Party, who has branded Mr. Zapatero as weak for negotiating with ETA, condemned the attack Friday and expressed his support for “our fellow members of the Socialist Party and Spain.” But he underscored the changes he would make to ETA policy if elected.

“Everyone knows what I think,” he said. “Freedom, the people’s rights, their individual rights will return to Spain.”

It was unclear Friday whether the attack would change the political equation in Sunday’s vote.

After the 2004 bombings, the official electoral campaign was also called off. The government launched a different campaign of its own, suppressing mounting evidence that pointed to radical Islamists. The prime minister at the time, José María Aznar, asked Spaniards to join mass antiterrorism rallies the day after the attacks, and the United Nations Security Council, at Spain’s insistence, passed a resolution attributing responsibility to ETA.

Rage at the government was evident on Election Day that year as voters, especially young people who had not planned to vote, flocked to the polls. They said they did so not so much out of fear of terror as out of anger against a government that they said mishandled the crisis.

ETA, which has killed more than 800 people over four decades in a bid for an independent Basque homeland, is considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.