Spain Frees Second ETA Prisoner over Rights Ruling

A Spanish court on Friday freed a second convict of the Basque militant group ETA and had 51 further appeals for liberty pending under a controversial European rights ruling.

The country's National Court ordered the release of Juan Manuel Piriz Lopez, who has served nearly 30 years of a 61-year sentence for killing an ex-member and shooting at two policemen in 1984.

A court source said it freed him owing to a decision on Monday by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which ruled that Spain was wrong to extend jail terms by retroactively cutting remission time.

Piriz was the second ETA convict freed in Spain since the ruling this week, after Ines del Rio Prada, on whose case the Strasbourg court ruled. A court in London granted conditional release to a third, Antonio Troitino.

On Thursday a court in Barcelona also freed a serial rapist, Antonio Garcia Carbonell, 76, making him the first non-terrorism convict to benefit from the change in the law.

The ruling in Strasbourg outraged the families of people killed by ETA.

Listed as a terrorist group in the United States and Europe, ETA is blamed for the deaths of 829 people in a four-decade campaign of shootings and bombings for an independent homeland in northern Spain and southern France.

Dozens of imprisoned ETA members have demanded their freedom since the European court's ruling and Spain's interior ministry said it could also lead several other rapists and murderers to be released.

The National Court said 51 other ETA convicts had also appealed, following the European decision, for it to overturn rulings that have extended their sentences.

It was set to rule on some of those cases individually from November 8, while some of them will be heard by higher courts.