The uproar in Spain over the written interview by our correspondent Thomas Catan with Iñaki de Juana Chaos, the imprisoned Basque separatist leader on hunger strike, is not because The Times broke any rules in obtaining his answers. Nor is it because we have shown any sympathy with a man originally sentenced to 3,000 years for orchestrating machinegun and bomb attacks that killed 25 people. The anger is because The Times is accused, in the phrase made famous by media reporting of the IRA, of giving the “oxygen of publicity” to Eta. Let us be clear. Eta is a terrorist organisation, responsible for at least 800 killings in Spain, but we believe that reporting which questions and probes terrorist thinking strengthens society’s ability to deal with the enemy within. The Times interview revealed a man devoid of remorse.

The international publicity comes at a moment when the Government of José Luis RodrÍguez Zapatero is facing its biggest crisis since it took office in 2004, over a policy on Eta that has all but imploded. De Juana has been on hunger strike for 92 days and is close to death. He is protesting against the recent imposition of an extra twelve years and seven months on top of the eighteen years he has already served for murder. He maintains, with some plausibility, that the sentence was political, secured for making terrorist threats in articles in a Basque newspaper but in reality intended to keep him in prison because a furious public reaction would accompany his release.

The Spanish Prime Minister is in an impossible position. He cannot afford to be soft on Eta, which arouses even more public anger and hostility than the IRA did in Britain. Eta insists, as does de Juana, that a ceasefire is still its policy despite the Madrid bomb last December which killed two people and forced Mr Zapatero to break off all talks. The Opposition has ruthlessly exploited Mr Zapatero’s former willingness to negotiate, parading Eta’s stance as evidence that the Government is falling into a trap set by terrorists. Yet the Prime Minister is not really in control of the situation. The main decisions on Eta are made by the courts, which are largely sympathetic to the conservative Opposition. It was the courts that handed down a second sentence at the top end of the prosecution’s suggested range. It was the Supreme Court that, last month, declared three inchoate Basque street gangs, largely made up of teenage supporters of separatism, to be “terrorist organisations” linked to Eta. That obliged the police to round up 18 gang members, provoking a backlash that may explain the crudely made bombs which exploded at a railway station in the Basque Country yesterday. And it is the Supreme Court that will rule on Monday whether de Juana’s new sentence should be annulled, cut to four years or increased to ninety-six years as the powerful Association of Victims of Terrorism is demanding.

To most Spaniards, de Juana is the monstrous epitome of 40 years of terrorism. Yet to let him die risks widespread, perhaps violent, rioting in the Basque Country and would provide Eta with a martyr figure. The Times has shone a light on a dilemma that many people in Spain would like to play down. Getting terrorists to lay down their arms is a fraught business, as Britain knows well, requiring endless time and talk. Wounds and emotions in Spain at present are too raw for either.