election in March 1979. Thus, they won three seats in the Spanish Parliament, which they did not occupy. Same happened in 1980 in the first elections to the Basque Parliament, in which HB stood as second political force, with 151,636 votes (16.55%) winning 11 seats. Its absence allowed a BNP-only Basque Government led by Carlos Garaikoetxea. On 20 November 1984 Brouard was assassinated by two members of the GAL. The killing is perhaps the only one performed by the GAL death squad within Spain itself. Another well-known Herri Batasuna leader and newly elected Spanish MP, Josu Muguruza, was assassinated by right-wing extremists in November 1989 in Madrid. GAL claimed responsibility for Muguruza's assassination. Suspicions also centered on Spanish neo-Nazi group Bases Autónomas. Recent times Amid the first talk of the Spanish government investigating the ties of Herri Batasuna with ETA, in 1998 Herri Batasuna was the driving force of the newly formed Euskal Herritarrok (We Basque Citizens) coalition, an acronym which got the best results to date for Basque left separatism in the Basque community, with 224,000 votes out of a total of 1,250,000 in the Basque election held that year. The most recent public party spokesmen was Arnaldo Otegi. Otegi, like a number of other top-ranks in Herri Batasuna, had been a member of ETA and served several years in prison for bank assault. He is currently serving time in prison for ties with ETA. Another important member of Batasuna was José Antonio Urrutikoetxea Bengoetxea, alias Josu Ternera, the main leader of ETA between 1987 and 1989 and accused of a number of assassinations like the 1987 Hipercor bombing which killed 21 people at Hipercor - a shopping center in Barcelona. He was imprisoned in France after 1989, released after finishing his sentence and was transferred to Spanish prisons, where he stayed for 2 more years until his release by the Constitutional Court, which stipulated that he had served his prison term in France. He was included in the Batasuna electoral ticket and elected to the Basque parliament between 1999 and 2001, where he was appointed as his party's representative in the Human Rights commission at the Basque Parliament, which, given his criminal background caused a stir in the rest of parties. He disappeared when the Spanish courts reopened cold charges and presented new ones about his current membership in ETA. Presently he lives in hiding and is considered