French arrests over Basque attack

Some 200 police were involved

French police have carried out dawn raids to arrest 13 suspected Basque separatists over an attack last year on a luxury hotel in southern France.

Seven of the suspects are French and six are Spanish, officials said.

They include Urtzi Garcia Montero, linked to the Eta cell Donosti, Spain's interior minister said in Madrid.

No-one was hurt in the attack last June on the hotel run by star chef Alain Ducasse, but Mr Ducasse decided in February to shut down the complex.

Investigators suspect the attack was carried out by the Basque separatist group Eta or a French group sympathising with Eta, a judicial source told Reuters news agency.

Eta has waged a violent campaign since the 1960s for an independent state in north Spain and south-west France and called off a 15-month truce in June.

Repeated attacks

Some 200 gendarmes took part in Monday's arrests, the French news agency AFP reported.

Last June's attack was the third against the Ostape Hotel, run by Mr Ducasse in the town of Bidarray in the Basque Country of south-west France.

An anonymous statement released to a Basque weekly paper said the attack "was aimed against the French colonisation of the Basque country".