Here's the full story on the ETA terrorists in Madrid. At 3:45 yesterday two Guardias Civiles pulled over a suspicious car, a blue Ford, in Collado Villalba, 38 kilometers northwest of central Madrid not far from El Escorial. The car had TWO occupants, not three. Officer Antonio Molina approached the car to check the occupants' IDs, and he was hit by two point-blank gunshots, one in the leg and the second in the abdomen. He was DOA at the hospital. The other cop, Juan Aguilar, opened fire on the car and hit one of the occupants, Gontzon Aramburu, in the neck and the abdomen (good shooting, Officer!). The second occupant of the car, Jesús María Etxeberria, fired and hit Aguilar in the arm; Aguilar is recovering in the hospital. Etxeberria carjacked a woman's Renault and made her drive to Segovia, where he dumped her in a rural area and drove on to Valladolid, where he caught a bus to San Sebastián. The Guardia Civil were waiting for him in the parking lot of the bus station there. Aramburu is also in the hospital, where he is in serious condition but will live. When more police arrived to answer Aguilar's call, they inspected the munitions used and instantly determined it was an ETA job; they checked the car for explosives and, sure enough, it was wired with forty kilos. The terrorists were going to blow it up somewhere in Madrid. So the cops destroyed the car with a controlled detonation. Aramburu has been arrested several times for political street violence. He disappeared in 1999 to join the big boys with the guns and dynamite. Etxebarria did thirteen years in prison as a member of the ETA, from 1987 to 2000. When he got out of jail on parole, he immediately went back to terrorism.

What a lot of people are wondering is why a terrorist would get parole, ever. Another bit of speculation is that the cops have a high-level mole inside ETA, since their last few attempted crimes have failed.