There were angry scenes in Pamplona this week when a convicted ETA terrorist was released briefly from jail to register as a deputy in the autonomous parliament of Navarre.
Jose Luis Barrios was sentenced earlier this year to 60 years imprisonment for the murder in January last year of Mr Alberto Jimenez Becerril, a Popular Party councillor, and his wife Mrs Ascension Garcia. The cold-blooded murder of the young couple in a Seville street horrified Spaniards, and was part of ETA's campaign of violence against PP local councillors, mostly in the Basque country, in which eight people lost their lives.
Barrios, a member of Euskal Herritarrok, formerly known as Herri Batasuna, the political front for ETA, was elected to the Navarre parliament in the June 13th elections. EH justified the inclusion of several terrorists in its lists for the elections as a gesture of "solidarity" with ETA prisoners and as a protest against the policy of jailing them far from their home provinces.
On Wednesday morning Barrios was taken, in handcuffs and under police escort, to the parliament building in Pamplona to receive his accreditation and after only half an hour was returned to his prison cell. An attempt by the Attorney General's office to prevent Barrios's appearance in the parliament was rejected.
Due to a controversial oversight in Spain's electoral law, there is nothing to prevent a convicted terrorist standing as candidate and being elected for political office. The Socialist local deputy, Mrs Lola Eguren, president of the Navarran parliament, said that she had no alternative but to allow Barrios to attend the sessions, but she refused permission for him to meet with any of his seven fellow EH deputies or with his parents.
"It gives me tremendous pain to be forced to share the chamber with an ETA prisoner," she said.
Barrios will be cast in an even more controversial role later today when he will take his place in the regional parliament building as the deputies cast their votes to choose their parliamentary officials and committees for the next four years. Under the electoral system, the youngest and oldest members in the chamber preside over the inaugural session, and 26-year-old Barrios, as the youngest elected deputy, will be one of the two who will supervise the voting.
It is not the first time a convicted terrorist has won an elected seat in parliament, and there have been many calls for a change in the electoral law. Mr Luis de Grandes, the PP spokesman in the Madrid parliament, said he would propose a debate on the subject in the Cortes. "We must avoid a repetition of such a repugnant event when a self-confessed ETA member and a murderer can take his seat in a parliament," he said.