The third week's sessions of the "Dirty War" trial in Madrid ended with some comfort for the chief defendant yesterday evening. Mr Jose Barrionuevo, a former interior minister, is charged with kidnapping and membership of an armed gang.
Gen Alonso Manglano, former head of the Spanish military intelligence agency, firmly denied that he had authorised documents which appeared to implicate the 1980s Socialist government in the GAL death squads.
These "Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberacion" fought the Basque extremists of ETA "with their own weapons", as military intelligence described it, in the mid-1980s.
Damaging evidence against Mr Barrionuevo from former antiterrorist commanders piled up on Tuesday and yesterday morning.
Another former military intelligence chief had insisted that the GAL could not have operated without the approval of the then prime minister, Mr Felipe Gonzalez. Gen Manglano, however, denied that he had ever discussed GAL with Mr Gonzalez.
The strangest comment, in a trial packed with allegations of the variety famed in Ireland as GUBU, came from the former minister himself, in a bitter courtroom clash with another ex-leader of the Socialist Party, Mr Ricardo Damborenea.
Both men are charged, along with 10 of Mr Barrionuevo's former subordinates, with the kidnapping of Mr Segundo Marey, a French resident who was mistaken for an ETA leader. Mr Damborenea, and nine of the others, plead guilty.
Much of the evidence against Mr Barrionuevo hinges on alleged phone conversations on the night of the kidnapping. Mr Damborenea claims to have witnessed a conversation with Mr Julian Sancristobal, a former director of state security, who says the then minister explicitly approved Mr Marey's illegal detention.
The court unexpectedly permitted two careos between the three men. This dramatic legal device required them to stand, face to face, in front of the judges and challenge each other's versions of events. Interruptions led to shouting, and quickly to straightforward abuse, which echoed around the colonnades of the august Supreme Court chamber.
Mr Barrionuevo, arms folded defensively, denied ever having phoned Mr Sancristobal about the kidnapping. He accused the prosecution of fabrication and shouted, to gasps of astonishment in the courtroom, that he "would not know how to be an informer."
As one observer pointed out, he used the very word with which Liam O'Flaherty's novel The In- former is translated in Spain. It is a word which implies membership of the sort of armed gang about which Mr Barrionuevo claims to know nothing.
A more charitable explanation is that he was merely accusing his ex-colleague of disloyalty to the Socialist Party.
"There are 10 people in the dock who left traces [of evidence], and have had to tell the truth," shouted Mr Damborenea, gesturing aggressively. "There are two who had the good luck not to do so, and you are trying to avoid accepting your responsibility."
The former head of the Guardia Civil, Mr Luis Roldan, himself currently in jail for corruption, told the court yesterday that Mr Barrionuevo told him the kidnapping had been carried out by the Interior Ministry.