Writer linked to Basque killings

MADRID - Pepe Rei is in the Spanish Government's sights.

He has been outing as "enemies" of the Basque people fellow journalists who subsequently suffer assassination attempts attributed to ETA. Unknown to most Spaniards until this week, Rei has been in and out of jail for years for pro-ETA sympathies, but the courts have never been able to pin on him the widely held belief that, in the pithy words of one outee this week, "Rei takes aim and ETA fires."

The Government, strengthening its counter-offensive against ETA's bloodiest terror campaign for years, is moving against the armed separatists' civilian accomplices and propaganda network. But it is hampered by laws protecting freedom of expression and the difficulty of establishing proof.

The state prosecutor has summonsed Rei for questioning in connection with a video circulated last week by his magazine, Ardi Beltsa (Black Sheep), that branded the El Pais correspondent in San Sebastian, Aurora Intxausti, a traitor and Government agent.

Days later, Intxausti, her husband and their 18-month-old son escaped death by a whisker when a bomb on their front doorstep failed to detonate.

The prosecutor investigating the link between the video and the attack thinks Rei may be charged with collaborating with terrorists or even incitement to murder. Many Basque journalists have long felt him breathing down their necks.

Rei, now 53, popped up in San Sebastian in 1976, shortly after the death of General Franco, in La the Voz de Espana newspaper that was linked to Franco's nationalist Movimiento.

In the whirlwind of the democratic transition, the paper changed tack to become radically pro-ETA and was closed in 1980 for being too fiercely Basque nationalist. He launched his own venture, La Voz de Euskadi, which flopped after a year.

Rei then joined the pro-ETA Egin, working first as sports editor, then bringing the newspaper closer to the people with local editions, and finally as chief of investigation and editor. He accumulated details about all Basque businesses, and it was assumed by many that this valuable archive provided ETA with the means for squeezing local entrepreneurs for protection money to finance its operations.

"It was always thought that information dug up by Egin fell into ETA's hands, and Rei - as chief investigative journalist and later editor - was the one on whom suspicions fell," a Basque journalist commented.

As ETA's truce gave way last December to the current terror campaign, Rei launched the glossy, well-produced "Black Sheep" four months ago. A limited-circulation publication available only on subscription, its main objective seems to be to finger fellow journalists as mouthpieces of Jose Maria Aznar's conservative Government in Madrid.

Those outed complain sotto voce that they feel they must measure every word they write, trapped in a straitjacket of self-censorship that veterans reckon is more frightening even than that Franco imposed.