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On 2 July 1978, Rosario (Agurtzane) Arregui Letamendi and her husband Juan José Etxabe, locked up the bar he ran and walked to their car to drive home. At around 11.15 pm, when Agurtzane Arregui was opening the driver’s door, a car containing a number of terrorists from the self-styled Apostolic Anti-Communist Alliance (Alianza Apostólica Anticomunista) pulled up beside them and opened fire on the couple. Arregui was hit 16 times and died instantly. Juan José Etxabe was seriously injured.

Agurtzane Arregui worked in a clothes shop and had two daughters. Her husband was a well-known former ETA leader, for which reason the couple had gone to live in the French Basque Country in the late 1960s.

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El Papus was a satirical magazine with the motto “Neither God nor master nor CNT”. Since its foundation in 1973, it had received a number of threats from extreme right-wing groups. It was finally attacked on 20 September 1977. Two terrorists handed a package to Juan Peñalver Sandoval, the doorman of the Luminor building in which the magazine’s newsroom was located, asking him to give it to Xavier de Echarri, the editor of El Papus.

At 11:40 am, Juan stepped out of the elevator on the first floor of the building, where the offices of El Papus and two other magazines, Party and El Cuervo, were located. The package exploded and Juan Peñalver was killed instantly. More than a dozen people were injured in the blast, including some who were not even inside the building, but walking on the street outside. Two women were seriously injured: Rosa Lorés, who worked as a telephone operator for Ediciones Amaika, the publisher of El Papus and other satirical magazines, and Rosa García Lanciano, Juan Peñalver’s wife.

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José Ramón Ansa Echevarría was abducted in the early hours of the morning as he was walking home after spending time with his friends at the local fiestas in the town of Andoáin (Guipúzcoa). He was later found dead with a bullet wound in the forehead in a ditch on the road between Andoáin and Urnieta.

His murder was claimed by Triple A, which accused him of being a member of ETA. His family denied the claim. Years later, Ignacio Iturbide and Ladislao Zabala, two extreme right wing militants who formed a unit of the Batallón Vasco Español (Spanish Basque Battalion), a group which attacked alleged nationalist sympathisers in the San Sebastián region, were convicted of his murder.

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David Salvador Bernardo was shot dead close to the RENFE rail station in Andoáin. His taxi was found in an area with poor accessibility on the day after the killing, with six 9-millimetre gun casings inside. The shots, one of them practically in the temple, had been fired from the back seat.

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Antonio Contreras Gabarri, aged 11, and his sister Maria, aged 17, both ethnic Roma, died after an explosive device consisting of between two and three kilos of Goma-2 exploded near a kindergarten in Bilbao on 23 July 1980, at around 9:30 pm. They caught the full force of the blast. Maria was nine months pregnant at the time and the explosion was so powerful that it separated the foetus from its mother. They were both killed instantly. Anastasio Leal Terradillos was also seriously wounded and died some hours later.

The attack was claimed by Triple A, which stated that it had merely intended to damage a kindergarten owned by a Herri Batasuna councillor.

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Anastasio Leal Terradillos was gravely injured when a plate glass window shattered and fell on him after a bomb exploded on the street next to a kindergarten. He died some hours later at Cruces Hospital after undergoing surgery.

Anastasio Leal’s colleagues came out on a 24-hour strike in protest against his murder. As a result, there was no refuse collection in Bilbao for a day.

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Description

Maria Contreras Gabarri, aged 17, and her brother Antonio, aged 11, both ethnic Roma, died after an explosive device consisting of between two and three kilos of Goma-2 exploded near a kindergarten in Bilbao on 23 July 1980, at around 9:30 pm. They caught the full force of the blast. Maria was nine months pregnant at the time and the explosion was so powerful that it separated the foetus from its mother. They were all killed instantly. Anastasio Leal Terradillos was also seriously wounded and died some hours later.

The attack was claimed by Triple A, which stated that it had merely intended to damage a kindergarten owned by a Herri Batasuna councillor.

María was nine months pregnant. After the explosion, the foetus was found lying next to her. They were all killed instantly. ¡remove this paragraph¡

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