Details of the plot were outlined in several CDs which allegedly belonged to ETA and were discovered in 2004, the online edition of Basque newspaper El Correo Digital reported. It said French anti-terrorism services were analysing them.

Spanish cabinet ministers were among the other "potential targets" of the planned missile attack, the newspaper added, citing unnamed French anti-terrorism sources.

Police found the CDs at a house in the French town of Saint-Michel, near the Spanish border, along with the remains of a missile which was likely used in a test launch, the newspaper said.

The CDs also included a map outlining the routes used by aircraft in the Basque Country and the nearby Gironde region of southwestern France, it added.

"The French specialists who have looked into the plan to attack the highest authorities of the Spanish state consider that the information gathering phase was very advanced," the newspaper said.

Police have foiled other ETA attempts to kill the Spanish monarch, including a plot to shoot him in 2004.

The king enjoys widespread popularity and is credited with helping to strengthen democracy following the death of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. But separatists see him as a symbol of a centralised Spain.

ETA is blamed for 825 deaths in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings for an independent Basque homeland on territory straddling the Franco-Spanish border in the western Pyrenees.

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Washington, April 29, 2009
At the height of the Cold War, a U.S. Army corps commander in Europe asked for information on his Soviet opposite, the commander of the corps facing him across the inter-German border. All the U.S. intelligence agencies, working with classified material, came up with very little. He then took his question to Chris Donnelly, who had a small Soviet military research institute at Sandhurst in the United Kingdom. That institute worked solely from open-source, i.e., unclassified, material. It sent the American general a stack of reports 6 inches high, with articles by his Soviet counterpart, articles about him, descriptions of exercises he had participated in and other valuable material.