Neighbourhood terrorist?

Donning a tuxedo for the occasion, young mothers could hardly fail to notice the dark, handsome doorman cheerfully greeting the young party-goers.

Others remember Gogeaskoetxea, 45, as a quietly spoken, polite family man blessed with practical skills, cheerfully knocking together a wooden structure in the back garden for his children to play in.

But it is now alleged that his relaxed charm and ability with his hands had been put to more sinister use before his arrival at a modest terrace house off the Botley Road, Oxford, in 2003.

His Oxford neighbours all lost touch with the Spanish couple, who lived with their two boys and a man who neighbours took to be a friend from Spain, but subsequently turned out to be Gogeaskoetxea’s brother.

The family’s departure, after a two-year residence at 38 Alexandra Road, was sudden with no fond farewells or drinks.

Neighbours would eventually learn that the Spanish family had moved to Cambridge — but only on reading that their former “lovely” neighbour had been arrested as a suspected terrorist at his home in that other university city, where once again Gogeaskoetxea had been living a double life, under the same pseudonym Cyril Macq.

In July, armed police from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit and Cambridgeshire Police swooped on the house he rented, suspecting that “the regular dad” was, in fact, a member of the Basque separatist group Eta and had been plotting to kill King Juan Carlos with a bomb at the opening of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, four years before he had set up home in Oxford.

It followed a long-term surveillance operation.

But this time his sudden departure did not go unnoticed, as his Cambridge neighbours woke to the sound of officers bursting into the three-bedroom house, as helicopters hovered over the property.

The suspected terrorist, who had worked as a computer designer, was reportedly arrested after a Spanish national recognised him at a sports club in Cambridge and tipped off the police.

He had apparently taken to playing squash regularly, becoming the membership secretary of Cambridge Squash Club.

His 55-year-old brother, Ibon Gogeaskoetxea Arronategui, known to his Oxford neighbours as Julien Floch, was not in the house.

In 2005, Ibon had moved to France, where he was arrested in a Spanish-French raid in 2010.

Last month, Eneko appeared before a district judge sitting at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

Judge Daphne Wickham ruled that the suspected terrorist could be extradited back to Spain to stand trial for a series of alleged offences.

He faces eight arrest warrants, including a series of charges such as placing grenade launchers aimed at Madrid Barajas Airport and a police station in Spain.

But the court in London discharged him from a charge of the attempted assassination of King Juan Carlos in 1997, after the judge accepted a defence submission that it was unsustainable in Spanish law.

The judge also discharged him from another allegation of organised armed robbery.

The court heard that Gogeaskoetxea allegedly had in 1996 become a member of the terrorist group Eta, which has killed more than 850 people in the half-century of the struggle for an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southwest France — and that he had been party to a plan to kill the King of Spain in October 1997.

The court was told the alleged offences detailed his activities up to five days before the monarch’s scheduled visit.

Gogeaskoetxea and others were stopped by police while filling garden window boxes with explosives, the court had heard at an earlier hearing.

During the course of their getaway, a police officer was shot and killed, Julian Knowles QC, for the Spanish authorities, had told the court.

The Spanish authorities in July said Gogeaskoetxea had obtained false documents that let him live in the UK under a false identity.

The Spaniard’s solicitor, Alastair Lyon, told The Oxford Times that an appeal against the extradition has now been submitted.

Gogeaskoetxea’s one-time Oxford neighbours have watched events unfold with astonishment, still scarcely able to take in the fact that a man allegedly unmasked as Spain’s most wanted terror suspect had been happily living among them, exchanging pleasantries at the gates of West Oxford Community Primary School.

Verna Thomas, 65, who has lived in Alexandra Road for 47 years, was Gogeaskoetxea’s next-door neighbour. She says she never became close to the family, recalling them as a quiet couple, busy getting on with bringing up two young children.

“I remember him building a little house for his children in the back garden, like a little shed. It is still there.

“I never thought for a moment that he might be a criminal.”

Another neighbour, Melissa Huckins, said: “We all thought they were just lovely people — the perfect neighbours. They would do anything for anybody and were always very friendly.

“I remember they did lots of things for the school, particularly the older children. He was brilliant with the kids, though my children were younger than his two — one being a toddler, one just a baby.

“Just ask anyone around the school and they will say that they still can’t believe any of this.

“We still remember him at the party, standing at the door in his tuxedo.”

But he never introduced anyone to his brother.

“We did not know his brother lived with him. We just thought the other man was a family friend,” said Ms Huckins.

No one can ever recall the Spaniard speaking about politics. But for some residents of Alexandra Road it will be difficult ever to view someone filling a window box with flowers without recalling their former neighbour.