Oops: French police video of suspects shows firefighters on holiday, not ETA commandos

French police video shows firemen, not commandos

PARIS — French investigators hunting for a gang of armed fugitives from the Basque separatist group ETA released a video of what they said were the suspects: a group of fit, trim young men captured in a grainy surveillance video at a suburban Paris supermarket.

It turns out they were just Spanish firefighters on holiday — not ETA commandos wanted in the deadly shooting of a French policeman. French and Spanish officials acknowledged Saturday that they had the wrong men.

Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said he deserved a share of the responsibility.

“Here’s something we haven’t done well, and I’m referring to both Spain and France, because we can’t lay the blame wholly on one side,” he said, adding that authorities should have made clear the video was just a hypothesis.

French police have been searching for suspected ETA members accused of killing a police officer in a shootout Tuesday in Villiers-en-Biere, southeast of Paris. Most of the group fled, but one suspect was caught and confessed to membership in the separatist group, the Paris prosecutor’s office has said.

Hoping to track down the culprits, French police distributed Friday a video of five men with a shopping cart at a supermarket in Villiers-en-Biere — images recorded on the eve of the shooting. It was not immediately clear what led police to suspect the men, other than that the store was near the crime scene.

Friends and relatives of the firefighters phoned authorities to say they recognized their loved ones in the footage, said the firefighting force in Catalonia, where they are based.

The firefighters turned themselves in to police in suburban Melun and answered questions before being released, a French police official said.

The director of France’s national police defended the release of the video, saying it allowed the firefighters to be cleared of suspicion quickly.

“We did exactly what we were supposed to do,” Frederic Pechenard told France Info radio.

One of the firefighters, Oscar Gonzalez, told Spanish state broadcaster RTVE: “This has generated lots of problems for us, from the worry it has caused our families to all this rigmarole we’re going through here.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero both said ETA was responsible for the killing.

It was the first time ETA has been blamed for the death of a French police officer. ETA, which is seeking an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France, is considered a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States.

Associated Press writer Harold Heckle in Madrid contributed to this report.