Politics

According to the Generalitat of Catalonia (institution under which the Spanish Autonomous Community of Catalonia is politically organized), the five suspects in the video displayed by French authorities are firefighters who were on climbing holidays.

French authorities mistakenly identified five men shown on video images as suspected members of the Basque separatist movement ETA when they were firemen on holiday, according to a court in Paris on Saturday.

French police displayed video surveillance images on Friday of five suspects in the killing of a police officer by a group believed to belong to the Basque separatist movement ETA.

Those involved with the inquiry had viewed the images after a retired policeman gave an account of spotting a group of men
speaking Spanish at the supermarket. French police thought they recognied the perpetrators of the shooting in the images. That led to orders by the French authorities to release the images to the media, the source said.

The images of the five suspects were taken in a supermarket on Monday morning, the day before officer Jean Serge Nerin was killed in a shootout near Paris.

His patrol had intercepted a vehicle speeding away from the scene of a car theft and was then fired on by gunmen in two other cars.

As well as the video images, police also published photographs of Joseba Fernandez-Aspurz, 27, who was arrested after the shooting and Arkaitz Aguirregabiria-del-Barrio, 27, whom they described as a senior leader of the ETA military wing.

President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged on Thursday to punish Nerin''s killers "with the utmost severity". Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero is expected to attend a memorial service for him next week.