ETA killed 853 people in its armed campaign to create an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southern France.
ADVERTISEMENTThirty-three years after Basque separatists ETA killed police chief Carlos Diaz Arcocha with a car bomb, his daughter says the group, whose dissolution was made public on Wednesday, achieved nothing and sowed only fear and sadness.
"It is in principle good news that they are not killing more people. Of course it is great that there are no more victims, but there is absolutely nothing to thank ETA for," Teresa Diaz said.
"All these years of terrorism have been for nothing," she said in her office in the coastal town of San Sebastian, where a black and white photograph of her father sits on the desk.
Diaz Arcocha was one of around 850 people ETA killed in an ultimately futile 50-year campaign to create an independent state in northern Spain and southern France, a toll for which it apologised last month.
ETA had been expected to announce its final dissolution, ending Western Europe's last significant militant movement, later this week, but a letter dated April 16 and published by El Diario online newspaper on May 2 declared it had "completely dissolved all its structures and ended its political initiative".
In the letter, ETA said it wanted to "open a new political cycle".
But the end of its campaign has not erased bitterness against the militants who killed 21 people in a single attack at Barcelona supermarket in 1987.
In 1980, the bloodiest year in its history, it was responsible for about 100 deaths.