Eta, not eater

Juan Ignacio "Iñaki" de Juana Chaos is what most right-minded people would call "a nasty piece of work".

A key figure in the Basque separatist and - let's not beat around the bush here - terrorist organisation Eta, de Juana Chaos was found guilty of organising (or maybe actually carrying out) various bombings in which 25 innocent people died. 25 lives meant a sentence of 3,000 years for de Juana - whose parents were not Basque and whose father was a Francoist Guardia Civil - but thanks to some odd clause in Spanish law which points out that it would be impossible for a human being to see out 3,000 years behind bars the sentence was automatically cut to a more bearable 18 years.

Less than one year per victim.

Knowing that there would be an outcry when the "man" was let out of chokey after his 18 year sentence, the government scrambled to find something else to put off de Juana's release date and found a couple of inflammatory articles he'd written for a Basque paper that were promoting terrorism, which amazingly added up to another 12 years... probably by that time another government would have to deal with the problem.

25 deaths = 18 years, 2 newspaper articles = 12 years... hmmm.

Something sounds a bit off here.

Needless to say de Juana thought so too and went on hunger strike.

The ins and outs of all this are too lengthy to detail here, but whether de Juana lives, dies, remains in prison or is set free on whatever terms will be bad for the government and only exacerbate the so-called Basque problem. Another thing that has exacerbated this problem was The Times printing pictures of de Juana Chaos "shackled" to his bed with what looked like bandages and with the physique of Victoria Beckham without the implants.

I'm certainly not going back to Tony Roma's for some time.

Still, just as Becks' missus only has herself to blame for the shape she's in, should the emaciated de Juana really be blaming the "Spanish state" for his protruding ribcage? Or should the ridiculous state of a legal system where a 3,000 year sentence becomes an 18 year one really be the focus of our anger rather than that of a hard-done-by murderous terrorist who has already done his time for the crime?

Ah, and news just in... apparently following the appointment of a government-friendly judge, de Juana's extra 12 years have been reduced to three. Compromise, perhaps?

Here's how the story was reported:

• The Times (original story)
• The Independent
• BBC News (on new reduction of his sentence)
• The Guardian (on de Juana Chaos and the peace process)

...and here's how a couple of Spain-based English -speaking bloggers gauged the Spanish reaction:

• The Big Chorizo (on how the Spanish papers saw things)
• Lavengro in Spain (on the Guardian article!)