Paris ? A member of the Spanish Civil Guard was shot and killed Saturday in southwest France in an attack officials blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA. It was the first death attributed to the militant group since it abandoned a cease-fire in June.

The daytime shooting took place in a supermarket parking lot in Capbreton, a sleepy resort town on the Atlantic coast near Biarritz, the Spanish and French interior ministries said. Another Spanish officer was wounded in the attack and was hospitalized in serious condition, the hospital said.

The suspects, two men and a woman, kidnapped a woman and used her car to flee the area, a police official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. They were being pursued by French and Spanish police.

The woman was tied to a tree in the forest, but broke free and reached police in the nearby town of Leognan, the police official said.

If ETA was responsible, it will be taken as a sign the group can still stage attacks despite the arrest of many members, and that it remains active in its push for an independent Basque state. Media reports called it the first death attributed to ETA in France in decades.

“Today ETA has committed a criminal act,” said Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

“Forty years of black terrorist history have not been enough for them to learn to judge the immense strength of Spain’s society,” he said, adding that nothing could be attained through terrorist violence.

He identified the dead guardsman as Raul Centeno and the injured one as Fernando Trapero. He said both were very young.

Zapatero’s Socialist government came under pressure after peace talks with the group stalled last year. Since then, he has taken a hard line toward the group and its political wing, Batasuna.

ETA declared a cease-fire in March 2006 but grew frustrated with peace talks with the government. It killed two people in a car bombing at Madrid airport in December 2006, and declared the truce formally over in June. Saturday’s killing was the first blamed on the group since December.

The officers, on a routine anti-terrorist operation with French counterparts, had stopped for coffee and found themselves a few tables away from the ETA suspects, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told reporters in Capbreton.

The suspects approached the officers as they returned to their vehicle, the group exchanged words, and then gunshots were fired, she said, calling the result murder in “cold blood.”

The guardsmen were unarmed at the time of the shooting, the newspaper El Pais said on its Web site.

Alliot-Marie said the guards had been tracking ETA members “who come to French territory to seek refuge or to prepare operations.” Spanish and French police chasing Basque separatists often conduct operations in each other’s territory.

Alliot-Marie and Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba went to the site of the attack from a ministers’ meeting in Germany.

Alliot-Marie firmly condemned the “odious act” in a statement and called for increased efforts to hunt the attackers.

ETA seeks self-determination for the Basque minority with a view toward setting up an independent state in the Basque areas in northern Spain and southwestern France.

The group has killed 800 people since the late 1960s.

Spain’s governing Socialist Party, gathered at a rally in Madrid, asked for a minute of silence in memory of the dead guard. Mariano Rajoy, leader of the opposition, did the same at a similar rally in Madrid.