Politics

A Spanish judge accused Venezuela Monday of collaborating with Basque separatist militants and Colombian rebels, and said these two groups plotted to assassinate Colombia''s president.Judge Eloy Velasco made the allegation Monday in a 26-page indictment in which he charged six members of the Basque group ETA, most of them exiled in Latin America, and seven members of the Colombian leftist rebel group FARC with a variety of crimes including terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder.

Velasco wrote that a Spanish probe launched in 2008 has turned up evidence that “demonstrates Venezuelan governmental cooperation in the illicit collaboration between FARC and ETA.''''

He identified a suspected ETA member, Arturo Cubillas Fontan, as a key figure in links between ETA and the FARC. This man lives in Venezuela, has held a job in the government of President Hugo Chavez and may still have one, the judge wrote.

Velasco said ETA and the FARC have been collaborating since 1993.

ETA members have received training in FARC rebel camps, and FARC members traveled to Spain to try to kill former Colombian president Andres Pastrana and the current president, Alvaro Uribe, with help from ETA, Velasco wrote.

FARC members in 2000 were monitoring Pastrana, who lived in Madrid for a while after leaving office, the judge wrote. Velasco did not say when the attack on Uribe was to have taken place.

The FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have been battling since 1964 to topple successive Colombian governments and establish a Marxist-style state.

Both are classified as terrorist organizations by the European Union and the United States.

The Spanish probe is based largely on e-mails that were in a computer used by a FARC leader named Raul Reyes, who died in a Colombian military raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador in March 2008.