By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 17, 2010; 11:45 AM

PARIS -- The Basque separatist group ETA was blamed Wednesday for a shootout in a Paris suburb in which a French policeman was killed and a wanted ETA militant was taken into custody.

The clash, Tuesday evening in Dammarie-les-Lys on the western fringe of the French capital, was a rare instance of the ETA underground carrying out a violent operation far from the Spanish border and the surrounding Basque area whose independence has been the goal of a long and often violent struggle. It marked the first time ETA militants have killed a French police officer, although French officers have been wounded in shootings in the French-Spanish border area.

The French government spokesman, Education Minister Luc Chatel, said evidence gathered by police indicates that the group seeking to hijack the cars was an ETA cell. The Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, offered his condolences to President Nicolas Sarkozy and, in a statement, condemned what he called "a criminal action by the ETA terrorist gang," according to reports from Madrid.

French and Spanish security services have a long history of cooperation against ETA, which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Country and Liberty in the Basque language. More than 500 people suspected of ETA ties, most of them Spanish, have been arrested over the past decade in France, where militants being tracked by Spanish police often seek refuge and logistics support.

In the latest such capture, a man described as the ETA military chief, Ibon Gogeascoechea Arronategui, was arrested last month along with two other people in a hideout in Normandy in western France.

The group in Dammarie-les-Lys, which police said numbered between six and 10, had just held up a suburban garage at gunpoint, making off with six vehicles that French police speculated were to be used in future attacks in Spain.

As some of the cars were being refueled nearby, a patrol vehicle carrying four policemen happened by. One person doing the refueling pulled out a weapon, police said, and a second gunmen opened fire after another car pulled up to the scene of the confrontation.

A 52-year-old policeman, identified as Jean-Serge Nerin, was hit by two rounds in the chest despite his body armor. He was taken to a nearby hospital but died from bleeding in his lungs, officials told reporters. Le Monde newspaper said the bullets entered his body through an opening in the body armor around his underarm.

The Spanish man taken into custody after the shooting, identified as Joseba Fernandez Aspurz, was the subject of an international arrest warrant put out by the Spanish government last year on suspicion of belonging to ETA and participating in violent operations in Spain. He was being interrogated by French counterterrorism specialists.