A former ETA member guilty of 25 murders was freed from a Spanish jail Saturday as the armed Basque separatist group marked the 40th anniversary of its first killing.
  
Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos served 20 years of an original 3,000 year sentence for the killings, which came in a string of 11 attacks.
  
De Juana Chaos went on three recent hunger strikes to protest against what he saw as media and judicial harassment, and against an additional three year sentence imposed on him for writing polemical tracts for a Basque newspaper.
  
De Juana Chaos walked out of Aranjuez prison, near Madrid, early Saturday accompanied by two lawyers and his wife.
  
His release came 40 years to the day after ETA's first assassination, on August 2 1968, of a Spanish police officer, in a campaign which has now claimed over 800 lives.
  
The release has caused a media storm in Spain, with a press campaign led by victims of ETA for him to remain behind bars.
  
Speaking on Friday, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero expressed his "contempt" for De Juana Chaos.
  
"For all citizens, and of course the head of the government, this individual generates a perfectly understandable feeling of contempt. But we must respect the law," he told reporters at a news conference, ahead of the release.
  
De Juana Chaos went on two hunger strikes, in 2006 and 2007, to protest against his additional three year sentence, just as he was about to be released, for articles he wrote for the separatist Gara newspaper.
  
A few days ago he began a third hunger strike in protest at what he deemed "harassment" by the media, justice and prison system against him.
  
Specifically he complained of an investigation into his assets to determine the veracity of his claim that he cannot repay his victims' families the eight million euros (12.5 million dollars) compensation imposed on him by a court.
  
De Juana Chaos took part in numerous ETA attacks, including one of the group's deadliest attacks -- a Madrid car-bombing in 1986 which killed 12 civil guards.
  
Repeated talks between the Spanish government and ETA (Euskdadi Ta Askatasuna), who want an independent Basque homeland in north east Spain, have ended in failure.
  
Their most recent victim was a policeman who was killed when a car bomb exploded in front of his barracks on May 14.
  
Since the IRA peace deal in Northern Ireland in 2005, it now remains the only separatist group in Europe labelled as a "terrorist" organisation.
  
ETA is blamed for the deaths of 823 people -- policemen, soldiers, judges, journalists and civilians -- in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings.
  
However, after a series of arrests and arms seizures, the group is believed by experts to be at a low ebb.