Javier Salutregi: "I could not have been appointed chief editor by ETA"

Senior staff of the newspaper Egin pointed out that they only met Alvarez-Santacristina when he gave a press interview
Imanol Murua-Uria, Special Correspondent - MADRID

During yesterday's court session in the 18/98 case Javier Salutregi, Egin's chief editor, and Teresa Toda, the paper's deputy chief editor, did not answer the questions put to them by the Public Prosecutor, but they responded as if they were, because through the explanations they gave their defence counsel, they provided details of the main events which form the basis of the prosecution's case: they said they had not had any meetings with the ETA leadership, only a press interview; so that interview had had nothing whatsoever to do with the appointment either of the chief editor or of the deputy chief editor; they said the Board of Directors of Orain (Egin's publishers) had suggested to Salutregi that he should accept the position of chief editor, because he had been responsible for the paper's restructuring process and then he, in turn, asked Toda to be deputy chief editor and appointed all the rest of the editorial staff; Salutregi could not have had direct links with the ETA leadership through a modem connected to his computer, because, among other reasons he did not have a modem; as it was impossible to monitor all the short messages that appeared in the paper's classified ads and messages sections, they did not know whether ETA members had ever used the paper to send messages to each other; they said the senior editorial staff team had been responsible for establishing the paper's editorial line, no one else; they explained that if Egin had used the concept of Euskal Herria, it had not in any way been as a result of following ETA's orders; or, for example, if the paper's editorial line had been in favour of Basque prisoners being transferred back to the Basque Country, it had simply been a reflection of calls being made by the Basque public.

The defence lawyer Alvaro Reizabal asked them numerous questions, addressed to Salutregi in particular, about an interview given in February 1992 by the senior ETA leader Jose Luis Alvarez-Santacristina, aka Txelis. Until now the prosecution has so far asked all the defendants in the Orain section of the case about that interview, because according to the indictment, a decision was taken in the "meeting" to appoint Salutregi as chief editor and Toda deputy chief editor.

Both Salutregi and Toda explained that it wasn't a meeting, but an interview that was going to be published. After the interview had been conducted, they explained that they did, however, wait for ETA's approval before publishing it, "following the same practice adopted with many other top-level politicians, despite the fact that we journalists deeply dislike it," as Salutregi pointed out. But the following month, in March, members of ETA's leadership, including Alvarez-Santacristina, who had been one of the interlocutors for the Egin press interview, were arrested in Bidart [in Lapurdi, in the Northern Basque Country]. Following the arrests in Bidart they decided not to publish the interview as it was, because, among other reasons, the interlocutor's arrest meant that he no longer represented the ETA leadership. So they adapted it: they sent additional questions to him in prison; in November, the day after Egin had appeared in its new format, they published what they termed as an interview with Txelis with the new answers.