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Agence France Presse

MADRID - Police have found over 100 kilos of explosives in northern Spain belonging to ETA in an operation linked to the arrest earlier this week of nine suspected members of the Basque separatist group, media reports said Thursday.

The explosives were found near the town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, about 10 kilometers from where police located another ETA weapons cache late on Wednesday, public radio RNE reported.

Several detonators, along with French and Portuguese vehicle license plates, were found along with the explosives, it added.

An interior ministry spokeswoman could not immediately confirm the reports.

Police late Wednesday found an automatic rifle, tools to steal cars and a box of tranquilizers in the nearby ski resort of Valdezcaray in the province of La Rioja which borders the Basque region.

Police also searched an apartment in Ezcaray in La Rioja for over seven hours on Thursday which they suspect was used by ETA as a laboratory where it assembled bombs and as a safe house, RNE reported.

The discovery of the two weapons caches and the apartment search follows the arrest Tuesday of nine suspected members of ETA's Vizcaya cell, including its leader Arkaitz Goikoetxea.

Police on Thursday detained a 10th person suspected of belonging to the cell in Getxo, an upscale suburb of the Basque financial capital Bilbao, an anti-terrorism source told AFP.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the cell was ETA's most active unit which had carried out most of the outfit's attacks since it called off a ceasefire in June 2007.

The cell was planning a large-scale car bombing before the end of the month in the Basque locality of Getxo, news radio station Cadena Ser reported, citing sources close to the investigation.

ETA leaders had ordered Goikoetxea to keep a watch over leading Basque anti-terrorism judge Fernando Grande-Marlaska of Spain's National Court in order to prepare an attack against him, a judicial source told AFP earlier on Thursday.

Grande-Marlaska, who has ordered the detention of several suspected ETA members, has a home in Ezcaray near where the two weapons caches were found.

"It's all part of the job," the Basque news agency Vasco Press quoted him as saying, adding he would be surprised it he was not on a hit list.

During police questioning, Goikoetxea said the tranquilizers were to be used by the cell to kidnap a Basque politician belonging to Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's ruling Socialist Party, the Europa Press news agency reported citing anti-terrorism sources.

In 1997 ETA kidnapped and killed 29-year-old town councilman Miguel Angel Blanco with a shot in the head, leading millions of Spaniards to pour into the streets in the biggest protests against the Basque separatist group.

ETA is blamed for the deaths of 823 people in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings to carve a Basque homeland out of northern Spain and southwestern France.