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French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised on Thursday to hunt down a group of suspected militants from the Basque separatist group ETA who are accused of the murder of a police officer near Paris this week.

Speaking to police officers, Sarkozy said the group would be "pursued and punished with the utmost severity".

"One of the members of this gang of killers is currently being held and we have quite precise information that will allow us to find his accomplices," he said.

Officer Jean-Serge Nerin, 52, was shot dead on Tuesday in a suburb near Paris after his patrol intercepted a vehicle speeding away from the scene of a car theft.

One man, believed to belong to ETA, was arrested at the scene and the rest of the group involved in the shootout is still being hunted by police.

Nerin is the first French policeman to have been killed by ETA, which has come under increasing pressure after a string of arrests of senior leaders in Spain and France.

"France will not be intimidated by Spanish terrorists," Sarkozy said. "Spain is a democracy. We stand side by side with Spanish democracy and we will fight terrorists."

Sarkozy said he had spoken by telephone with King Juan Carlos and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, who will attend the funeral of the officer next Tuesday.

Search continues for escaped assailants

France is continuing its area wide search for members of the command that on Tuesday night carried out the killing of one of its agents on the outskirsts of Paris, the first French police officer to ever be killed by ETA.

Authorities in the country to not rule out the possibility that as many as ten ETA-members were implicated in the attack, including one blonde woman.

Judicial police have started interrogating the only suspect detained so far, Joseba Fernández Aspurz - known as El Guindi - who, according to official sources, has so far maintained the "classic attitude among ETA people" of refusing to speak except to confirm his membership to the organisation.

Investigation is moving quickly

The French Home Office Minister, Brice Hortefeux, explained on Thursday morning that the investigation into the attack was moving quickly. During an interview with French radio, the minister declared that those who escaped "will not be on the run for long, as the investigation is progressing rapidly, and the perpetrators are being identified" with the help of witnesses.

Without giving any more details regarding the enquiry, the minister confirmed that "various factors have clearly enabled us to corroborate that this has been a action carried out by ETA".

Reconstruction of events

According to antiterrorist campaign sources, the shooting took place when French security forces surprised four ETA members filling up four vehicles - all of which were large cylinder BMWs - with petrol shortly which had been recently stolen from a nearby car dealership. Police had been alerted of the robbery and approached the area in orderto identify the suspects, finally cuffing one of the members, Joseba Fernández Aspurz.

More members then turned up in a further two vehicles, at least one of whom then opened fire on the agents when they realised what was taking place. Following the shooting, all the ETA members escaped in two of the vehicles, except for Fernández Aspurz, and another two who fled across country on foot.

First time ETA kills French policeman

The shooting in which the 52-year-old policeman was killed is the fifth armed confrontation carried out by ETA on French security forces since 1996, though the first time an agent has actually died as a result.

Before Tuesday''s attack, the most recent of its kind took place on 8th June 2009 in the area of Saint-Énimie in south-west France, when one policeman was injured following a shoot out with two suspected members of the armed group, who had stolen two vehicles.

UNLIKELY CHANGE IN TACTICS

Tuesday''s killing was unlikely to herald a more aggressive attitude towards the French authorities, according to Juan Aviles, a history professor at Spain''s UNED open university.

Instead, they may be struggling to operate effectively."You get the impression that they''re improvising, that they lack of professionalism as criminals." Until Tuesday, ETA had not claimed a fatal victim since July, when it killed two police officers on the island of Majorca with a bomb.

Polls indicate a significant minority of the inhabitants of the Spanish Basque Country, where Basque language and culture have remained distinct, would like independence, although only a smaller number sympathise with violent groups. In the French Basque Country, the distinctive Basque language is no longer widely spoken and separatist sentiment is weak.