Wanted 'ETA suspects' were holidaying firemen

Five people identified as ETA suspects in a surveillance video after a French policeman was shot and killed near Paris were in fact Spanish firemen on a climbing holiday, officials said Saturday.

The five from Spain's Catalonia region were caught on camera at a supermarket while on a trip to "practise their climbing", said a spokesman for the Catalan regional government.

They had been staying at a gite (holiday cottage) but were recognised by colleagues in Spain who alerted authorities to the mistake, added a Catalan police and fire service spokeswoman.

"This morning (Saturday) we contacted the French authorities to tell them that the images were those of people working as firemen for the Catalan regional government," she said.

Director general of the French national police Frederic Pechenard confirmed the misunderstanding.

The men had on Saturday presented themselves to the police station at Melun, southeast of Paris, he said.

But he added that the confusion "absolutely does not call into question the implication of ETA in events."

France and Spain on Friday released images from closed-circuit television cameras of the five whom Spanish police said were suspected members of the Basque separatist organisation involved in the killing.

The images filmed a day before the shooting showed five young men at the entrance to a supermarket in the town of Dammarie-les-Lys, southeast of Paris, one of them pushing a trolley.

A Spanish police statement on Friday described them as "ETA terrorists" and called for "cooperation from the public to identify them and find them."

The 52-year-old French police officer was fatally wounded during a gun battle that erupted after a routine police check near Dammarie-Les-Lys, also southeast of Paris, on Tuesday.

French investigators said they were working on the assumption that ETA was responsible although there has been no claim of responsibility from the group itself.

French anti-terrorism police arrested a 27-year-old man who identified himself as an ETA member and were hunting five others after the murder, a French judicial official said on Wednesday.

Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega admitted that the "confusion" was regrettable but said it was vital "to continue to work as we have done" to combat the group.

It would be the first time a French policeman has been killed by the group in France, where five top leaders have been arrested over the past two years as a result of stepped-up cross-border cooperation.

ETA, banned as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States, is blamed for 828 deaths in its 41-year campaign for independence for the Basque region of northern Spain and southwestern France.

It resumed attacks in mid-2007 after a 15-month truce and abortive negotiations with Zapatero's Socialist government, which has since adopted a firm line against the group.

-AFP