ETA admits killing police officers

MADRID, Spain -- Basque separatist group ETA has claimed responsibility for the deaths of two police officers shot dead last month.

It also said it had carried out a recent bombing of a social security office in the region as well a bombing which injured another two members of the Basque police force.

ETA admitted the killings in a statement given to the Basque language newspaper Gara on Sunday.

Police officers Ana Isabel Arostegi and Francisco Javier Mijangos were killed in Beasain, a town in the northern Spanish region, on November 23.

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Arostegi, a 34-year-old married mother-of-three, was the first female officer in the Basque police force to be killed by ETA.

Arostegi and Mijangos, 32, were directing traffic in Beasain when they were attacked.

Thousands of people marched through the town in protest at their deaths.

The Basque police -- known as the Ertzaintza - are controlled by the local authorities and not by the central government in Madrid.

ETA said in the Gara statement it saw the force as a legitimate target because it was "an important part of the political-institutional-economic repressive network for keeping the Basque Country under Spanish rule."

ETA announced in March it would target the force and the armed group has now killed of its 13 members.

The threat on the police force was condemned by Javier Arenas, secretary-general of Spain's ruling Partido Popular.

"ETA's communique doesn't surprise us because ETA's only goal is to threaten and to kill. But we are all with the police force to wipe out terrorism," Arenas said.

The latest crackdown by Spanish police, working closer with Basque regional police, and France has dismantled key command cells in Madrid and the Basque region itself.

Spanish newspapers reported on Friday that the United States would send CIA and FBI agents to Spain to provide technical support to help Madrid counter ETA, following a visit by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to Washington on Thursday.

ETA has killed more than 800 people in a campaign for a separate state in the Basque areas of northern Spain and southwestern France, which has lasted more than three decades.