A businessman whose company was working on a high-speed train route between the Basque Country and Madrid was killed today in an attack blamed on the separatist group Eta.

Ignacio Uría, 70, was shot twice in the chest and face as he left a restaurant in Azpeitia, near San Sebastian, in the Basque Country.

The father-of-five had just left his favourite restaurant Kiruri, where he went to play cards regularly. Three men, thought to be members of Eta, escaped in a stolen Alfa Romeo.

Emergency services initially tried to revive Mr Uria, but he died shortly afterwards from his injuries.

José Antonio Alonso, Socialist Government spokesman, condemned the murder, saying that all parties would unite until the “ultimate defeat of the defeat of the terrorists of Eta”.

Mr Uria was owner of the construction firm Altuna y Uría, which was working on part of the high-speed AVE train connecting the Basque Country to Madrid and France.

Eta has threatened many companies and their workers involved in the train project as it views such construction as an imposition on the Basque Country by the Spanish and French governments.

A recent message from a group linked to Eta condemned the high-speed train as a project which was “anti-social, anti-ecological, wasteful of resources and inappropriate for the (Basque) Country.”

Mr Uria had received a number of threats from Eta. The separatist organisation demands what it calls a “revolutionary tax” from many businesses in the Basque Country as a way of financing its armed struggle.

The fatal shooting came two weeks after the arrest in France of the alleged military leader of the group, Mikel de Garikoitz Aspiazu, who was known as Txeroki or Cherokee.

The Spanish Interior Ministry had said it expected Eta to retaliate for that arrest. Eta has killed more than 825 people in its 40-year struggle for an independent Basque Country in northwest Spain and south west France.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb