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MADRID - A convicted murderer belonging to Basque separatist group ETA has not ended a hunger strike, prison officials and his lawyer said today after a Spanish newspaper reported he had abandoned the 3-1/2 month protest.
Inaki de Juana Chaos, a key ETA member convicted of killing 25 people, is no longer receiving any food after a tube used to force feed him was removed, the Spanish prisons service said.
"ETA prisoner Jose Ignacio de Juana has not abandoned his hunger strike and, today, is not receiving nutrition in any way," the prison service statement said using the Spanish version of his name.
Spain's El Mundo newspaper reported De Juana had given up his hunger strike in a Madrid hospital after the country's supreme court on February 12 cut his 12-year sentence for making terrorist threats to three years.
De Juana has already served 20 years for killing Spanish military and police officials during the 1980s as part of ETA's four-decade campaign for an independent Basque homeland.
Thousands of ETA victim group members and opposition Popular Party supporters demonstrated in Madrid on Saturday to demand he serve the full three years of his sentence.
The prison service has the option of freeing de Juana within a year, because of time he has already served.
Pictures of his emaciated body strapped to a hospital bed were published across the world this month after a newspaper interview in which he asked to be released and called on the government to reopen peace talks with ETA.
Spain's socialist government abandoned the peace process after ETA exploded a car bomb at Madrid airport in December, killing two men in its first deadly attack in over three years.
De Juana's hunger strike has stoked nationalist street violence in the Basque country and outraged Spain's conservative opposition, which claims he is trying to blackmail the state.
Analysts say De Juana's death would spark new Basque violence and give the region a martyr like the Irish republican movement's Bobby Sands, who died in jail on a hunger strike.
De Juana's lawyer on Saturday said his protest would go on.
"I just spoke to him, he has been fed till now, but yesterday they took the tube out of him and now he isn't receiving any type of food because he's on hunger strike," Arantza Zulueta told Basque radio station Euskadi Irratia.
- REUTERS
