(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Spanish Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja, RSF expressed its anger over the 3 March 2001 attack on the headquarters of the regional daily “El Correo” in Bilbao. “This newspaper is again the victim of terrorism, following a bomb attack on its Vitoria bureau in July 2000. We ask that […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Spanish Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja, RSF expressed its anger over the 3 March 2001 attack on the headquarters of the regional daily “El Correo” in Bilbao. “This newspaper is again the victim of terrorism, following a bomb attack on its Vitoria bureau in July 2000. We ask that you take all necessary measures to combat the way in which violence against the press has become an everyday fact of life in Spain,” Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general, asked the minister. RSF recalled that about fifty journalists and publication directors are under police escort in the Basque Country and in Madrid.
According to information collected by RSF, about twenty Molotov cocktails were thrown at the headquarters of the Basque regional daily “El Correo” in Bilbao (northern Spain), the evening of 3 March. This attack, for which no one has claimed responsibility, occured while about forty persons were working inside the building which houses the paper. There were no victims. A number of small fires were quickly contained.
The daily “El Correo” has previously been attacked by radical independence groups close to the organisation Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA). On 7 July 2000, a bomb exploded in front of the newspaper’s offices in Vitoria. The bomb caused material damage, but there were no victims in the attack (see IFEX alert of 12 July 2000). The El Correo press group and its journalists have often been threatened in recent years. The newspaper’s director is exiled in Madrid, along with a dozen other journalists.
RSF recalls that journalists are a favoured target in the armed independence organisation ETA’s violent campaign against the Spanish state. In the Basque Country, as in the rest of the country, in Madrid or Barcelona, Basque media and journalists who do not support the radical nationalist ideology are called “traitors” or “Spanish invaders” and receive death threats. Several individuals narrowly escaped assassination attempts in 2000, in bomb attacks in which they were personally targeted. José Luis Lopez de Lacalle, a journalist with the daily “El Mundo” in the Basque Country, was assassinated last May (see IFEX alert of 8 May 2000). In the months following the assassination, threats and bomb attacks against journalists and their offices multiplied. In total, close to 100 journalists are under official or private protection. A dozen information professionals “exiled” themselves from the Basque Country and went to Madrid, and some media have introduced dramatic security precautions, such as bulletproof glass and scanners.
