text: International links ETA was known to have had 'fraternal' contacts with the Provisional Irish Republican Army; the two groups have both, at times, characterized their struggles as parallel. Links between the two groups go back to at least March 1974. ETA purchased Strela 2 surface-to-air missiles from the IRA and in 2001 unsuccessfully attempted to shoot down a jet carrying the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar. IRA member Maria McGuire stated the IRA received fifty revolvers from ETA in exchange for explosives training.
  In the late 1960s, the Portuguese group  (LUAR), which was fighting the dictatorship, brokered the contacts that allowed ETA to purchase weapons in the former Czechoslovak Republic. The partnership continued as LUAR would later assign part of the  stolen passports on Portugal consulted in Rotterdam and Luxembourg, in 1971. These were used by ETA in the Ogro operation that resulted in the  assassination of Prime Minister, Admiral Carrero Blanco. Later, in 1981, when Portugal and Spain were living already in full democracy, ETA exchanged weapons, explosives and provided logistical support to the Forças Populares 25 de Abril (FP-25), a Portuguese far-left terrorist group. In 1981, FP-25 received Gama 2 explosives and two dozen FireBird pistols in exchange for G3 machine guns. Additionally, ETA came to harbor, in the Basque Country, two FP-25 terrorists who needed to retreat.
  ETA acquired weapons from Carlos the Jackal (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez) in the early 1980s.
  In 1999 ETA militants teamed up with the (now self-dissolved) Breton Revolutionary Army to steal explosives from magazines in Brittany.