1980 Markina attack

The 1980 Markina attack was a mass shooting carried out by the Basque separatist organisation ETA on 20 September 1980 near the Basque town of Markina (Spanish: Marquina) in Spain. The targets were a group of off-duty civil guards who were eating lunch in a bar in the town. Four civil guards were killed. The attack was among the deadliest of 1980, the year in which ETA killed more people than in any other year.

The shooting was the first ETA attack after the Spanish government had survived a vote of confidence, and the first after the Basque Nationalist Party had agreed to return to the Spanish parliament following a short dispute. The civil guards who were killed had been responsible for guarding the Esperanza y Cía arms factory. Seven months earlier, ETA had ambushed and killed six civil guards who were guarding weapons in transit from the factory in an attack near Ispaster.

The bar normally served around twenty customers at lunchtime and was popular with civil guards, standing about 200 metres from their barracks. Its main entrance was usually closed once the bar had filled, leaving a back entrance for latecomers. At 14:40, eight people were present — two bar workers, two postal workers and the four civil guards — when a man of about 25 entered, had a drink and left. Shortly afterwards, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the bar's owners, who had been clearing tables, answered a knock at the back door. Three men then entered, moved quickly to the guards' table, produced machine guns and shot the four civil guards, who were killed instantly. The attackers escaped in a car that had been hijacked at gunpoint about an hour before the attack; its owner was later found bound and gagged near a hill in the town of Elgóibar. A forensic sweep of the bar recovered numerous parabellum shell casings, a type of ammunition that security forces associated with ETA.

One of those accused of involvement was Jose Ramón Foruria Zubialdea, alias 'Foru,' who was accused of supplying information to ETA's Eibar commando unit, including a plan of the bar. He fled from Spain to Venezuela in 1982 and was extradited back to Spain in September 2003. He admitted having supplied information to ETA but denied involvement in the Markina attack; found guilty, he was sentenced to forty years in prison and released in August 2011 on grounds of ill health. In 1984, Jaime Rementería Beotegui was found guilty of participation in the attack, fined 60 million pesetas and imprisoned; held since August 1983, he was released in January 2004. Fidel González García, who lent his car to the perpetrators and housed them for several days before and after the attack, received the same sentence. Two other defendants were acquitted at the same trial.