Madrid insists ETA must turn its back on violence for good

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the group was badly hit by arrests and desperate to regroup and rearm.

He ruled out negotiations on their goal of an independent homeland.

"The word truce, as the idea of a limited peace to open a process of dialogue, is dead."

He said ETA could not be trusted after shattering a 2006 truce with a deadly car bombing.

He insisted its statement on Sunday, by three hooded militants speaking in a video, fell short of what Basque society and other Spaniards demand: that ETA renounce violence for good.

Basque regional interior minister Rodolfo Ares in the first official comment on the announcement, said: "It's absolutely insufficient because it does not take into account what the vast majority of Basque society demands and requires from ETA, which is that it definitively abandon terrorist activity."

The new pledge from ETA, which has been fighting for an independent homeland in parts of northern Spain and south-western France since the late 1960s, left several key questions unanswered.

Besides silence on whether it will surrender its weapons, it did not say if the truce was open-ended and permanent, such as the one declared in 2006, or whether it would halt other activities such as extorting money from business leaders or recruiting members.

Nor was there any mention of whether the ceasefire could be monitored by international observers as called for on Friday by two Basque parties that back independence – ETA's outlawed political wing Batasuna and the more moderate pro-independence party Eusko Alkartasuna.

Since late last year, divisions have been emerging and widening between ETA and the political parties that support it.