Nerea Garaizar arrived back in Spain yesterday to face trial at the High Court following her extradition by French authorities. She was arrested in December 2001 in Auch, a town located around 80km to the west of Toulouse, along with two other alleged members of the Basque terror group ETA.

Inside the car they were travelling in at the time of their arrest were found two handguns, false licence plates, 750,000 of the old Pesetas in French Francs as well as various sets of skeleton keys used for robbing cars.

Garaizar, who was born on the 30th July 1975 in Barakaldo is alleged to have been a member of two separate ETA command units: the Aragón command, which was brought down on the 27th July 2000 with the arrests of David Pla and Aitor Lorente, and then the Zapaburu command, which ceased to be operational following the arrests made on the 26th March 2001 in Galicia.

Although Garaizar managed to escape, one of the women arrested later confessed that the group had been planning to assassinate former regional president and PP party stalwart, Manuel Fraga. Also on the band's list of targets were regional ministers, José Antonio Orza Fernández and Celso Currás Fernández.