French police arrested 12 people linked to Basque separatist groups in a major operation aimed at catching the perpetrators of a hotel bomb attack, police and legal sources said Wednesday.
   
Seven of the arrests were in connection with the 2006 attack on the hotel in the southern French town of Bidarry and five others were part of a probe into the financing of Basque groups, a legal source in Paris said.
   
The arrests were carried out Tuesday and early Wednesday in towns across France's southwestern Basque region and included two senior figures of the separatist political party Batasuna.
   
Batasuna is legal in France but banned in Spain because it is the political wing of the armed group ETA, blamed for the deaths of 824 people over four decades in a campaign for a Basque homeland straddling northern Spain and southwestern France.
   
Police were Wednesday searching the Batasuna headquarters in the French town of Bayonne.
   
The Askatasuna support group for Basque prisoners said two of the men arrested Thursday were senior members of Batasuna and named them as Xabi Larralde and Jean-Claude Aguerre.

Crack down
   
Askatasuna said in a statement that French police were using the Bidarry hotel attack -- which caused no injuries and only minor damage to the building -- as an excuse to crack down on Basque separatists.
   
The latest attacks blamed on ETA left a Spanish soldier dead and 11 people wounded last weekend in a trio of car bombings in Spain.
   
France has pledged to help Spain in its clampdown against ETA after the group called off a 15-month-old ceasefire in June 2007 and shattered hopes of a peace settlement.
   
Police in eastern France on Tuesday arrested two armed Spaniards, a man and a woman, suspected of belonging to ETA. Spanish newspapers reported Wednesday that one of the pair had acted as the liaison between ETA and Batasuna.