Spain demanded on Monday that Venezuela answer charges it helped Basque separatist group ETA and Colombian rebels plot to kill Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe in Spain, allegations Caracas dismissed as "unacceptable."

NONE"The Spanish government will act accordingly depending on the explanation and the statements that are made by the Venezuelan government," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told journalists in Hanover.

Earlier on Monday a Spanish judge charged six members of the Basque group ETA and seven members of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) with involvement in the plot to kill Uribe and other Colombian officials.

But a Venezuelan foreign ministry statement said that Caracas "became aware, via the press, of the indictment issued by a Spanish judge, in which the accusations are unacceptable and politically motived."

High Court judge Eloy Velasco based his case largely on information found in the computer of Raul Reyes, the FARC's former number two who was killed in Ecuador in March 2008 in a Colombian military operation.

Velasco said a FARC member had monitored the Colombian embassy in Spain and the routes taken by Madrid-based former Colombian president Andres Pastrana, according to a copy of his ruling.

The FARC member concluded that "it would not be difficult to carry out an attack on those two targets as long as they could count on the help of ETA," the ruling said.

'Illegal collaboration' with rebels

The Colombian guerrillas asked ETA to follow Pastrana, as well as Colombia's former ambassador to Spain Noemi Sanin, current Vice President Francisco Santos and the former mayor of Bogota Antanas Mockus "with the aim of assassinating one of them when they were in Spain."

NONE"More recently" Uribe was also added to that list, the ruling said.

It was not clear when the attacks were to be carried out.

Velasco alleged "Venezuelan government cooperation in the illegal collaboration between FARC and ETA."

He said the key to this cooperation was ETA member Arturo Cubillas Fontan, who was named to a post in Venezuela's agriculture ministry in 2005 and whose Venezuelan wife, Goizeder Odriozola Lataillade, is an official in the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez.

Fontan was in charge of ETA operations "in this part of Latin America since 1999" and "coordinated relations between FARC and ETA and the participation of ETA members in courses on explosives and urban guerilla warfare," Velasco said.

ETA members were escorted by Venezuelan soldiers to a jungle camp in the state of Apure in western Venezuela where they trained FARC rebels on how to handle explosives, he added.

In exchange FARC rebels provided ETA guerrillas with training on how to use surface-to-air missiles.

The judge charged Fontan and two FARC members, Edgar Gustavo Navarro Morales and Victor Ramon Vargas Salazar, with conspiracy to commit terrorist murders.

Extradition request

He called on Spain's foreign and interior ministries to ask the governments of Cuba and Venezuela to extradite some of the 13 suspects who are residing in those two countries.

NONEUribe has rejected a political dialogue with the FARC, which has battled the Colombian government for 45 years.

"I think that we will have a prudent reaction and look at what is happening through diplomatic channels," Uribe told RCN radio in Bogota on Monday from Montevideo where he was attending the inauguration of Uruguay's President Jose Mujica.

Tensions between Bogota and Caracas, spurred by a US deal with Bogota allowing US forces to run anti-drug operations from Colombian bases, have resulted in the severing of diplomatic ties and other tensions between the neighbours.

ETA, which figures on the terrorist blacklists of the European Union and the United States, is blamed for 828 deaths in its 41-year campaign for independence in the Basque region of northern Spain and southwestern France.

- AFP