AFP - Security forces in France on Saturday arrested the suspected military chief of ETA, the third top leader of the Basque separatist organisation to be captured in the last six months, Spanish national radio said.
   
Jurdan Martitegi was detained along with two other ETA suspects in the vicinity of the southern French city of Perpignan in an operation carried out in cooperation with Spanish security forces, the radio said, quoting anti-terrorist sources.
   
The French interior ministry said three ETA suspects were arrested in the village of Montauriol, but it did not identify them.
   
Spanish news reports said Martitegi confessed his identity to the arresting officers, who also seized three guns and a car with false number plates.
   
The radio said Spanish security forces detained a further four ETA suspects in different parts of the Basque Country hours later in related operations.
   
The mayor of Montaurial, Patrick Mauran, said the three were arrested around 6:00 pm (1600 GMT) near the village church after arriving hours earlier for what appeared to be a meeting.
   
"None of them lived in the village," he told AFP.
   
The Basque news agency Vasco Press said Martitegi, 28, had been a member of ETA's most active unit, the Viscaya cell, which was dismantled by Spanish police last July with the arrest of several members.
   
He is believed to have replaced Aitzol Iriondo, who was arrested in France on December 8, as leader of ETA's military operations.
   
Iriondo had himself replaced Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, who was arrested in France on November 17.
   
Saturday's operation was coordinated by Spain's top anti-terrorist judge, Baltasar Garzon, who described it as "very good news" for the Spanish people.
   
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist Party welcomed the "excellent news" of the three arrests in France.
   
In a statement, it congratulated the security forces "for their constant and intense work to end terrorism inside and outside our borders."
   
"It is a task that, without doubt, counts on the maximum collaboration with the security forces of other countries as, once again, France has shown," it said.
   
"Terrorists must know that the only path they can take with these actions is one that leads to prison."
   
ETA, considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, is blamed for the deaths of 825 people in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings to carve a Basque homeland out of parts of northern Spain and southwestern France.
   
It resumed attacks in mid-2007 after a 15-month truce following a deadlock in tentative peace talks with Madrid, since when Zapatero's Socialist government has taken a hard line against it.
   
ETA earlier this month warned that the incoming regional government of Spain's northern Basque Country lacked "democratic legitimacy" and would be its "priority target".
   
The leader of the Basque Socialist Party, Patxi Lopez, is set to become the head of the regional Basque government under a deal reached between the party and the conservative Popular Party earlier this month following local elections in March.
   
Lopez, who will replace Juan Jose Ibarretxe of the moderately nationalist PNV party, will be the first leader of the Basque government who unequivocally backs the region's unity with Spain since it was granted wide autonomy in 1979.
   
The Basque region has been run for nearly 30 years by the PNV on a platform that flirts with independence.