The country’s highest court is to ask Colombia “to furnish any information they may have on links between the FARC and ETA,” the source said, after data suggesting such links was found on a captured FARC laptop computer.At the same time, Spanish police are to be asked to look into relations between the two organisations.The laptop in question belonged to FARC number-two Raul Reyes, killed in March during a clash with Colombian forces just inside neighbouring Ecuador.FARC, the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, confirmed Sunday that its founder and longtime chief, Manuel Marulanda, has died after leading a bloody campaign stretching back four decades.The FARC has become South America’s longest-running and largest insurgency. The rebels are believed to hold an estimated 750 people hostage, and traffic drugs to fund their insurgency against the government.Listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States, ETA is blamed for the deaths of more than 820 people in its own 40-year campaign for an independent Basque nation in northern Spain and southwestern France.Last Friday, Colombia’s Vice President Francisco Santos alleged that FARC rebels sought to forge an alliance with ETA to launch an attack in Spain on top Colombian officials.But the Anncol news agency, which is sympathetic to the FARC, said on its website that the Bogotá government mistook a reference to the town of Madrid in central Colombia for a reference to the Spanish capital.Santos said “the FARC’s contacts with ETA and drug traffickers exporting cocaine to Europe are not new, and when they are secure in Colombia, they try to do harm overseas,” which, he claimed, was the rebels’ goal.”In any case, the police and defense ministry continue to do intelligence analysis on the FARC’s relationship with ETA but (foreign operations) is one of the risks you have to take,” Santos told RCN radio from Geneva. (AFP)
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