MADRID, July 22, 2008 (AFP) - Spanish police dismantled Tuesday the most active cell of the armed Basque separatist group ETA with the detention of nine suspected members of the group, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.

'We can't say this is the only ETA unit but it was the most active, most dynamic and of course the most wanted one,' he told a news conference.

Among those captured was Arkaitz Goikoetxea, the leader of the 'Vizcaya' cell which Spanish authorities suspect was behind most of the attacks carried out by ETA since it called off a ceasefire in June 2007, the minister said.

Two people were arrested outside of the Basque region. One was detained in the northwestern province of Galicia and another in the province of Malaga on Spain's southern Mediterranean coast.

Rubalcaba said the 'Vizcaya' unit is suspected of the car bombing of a police barracks Legutiano in May that claimed the life of one officer as well as attacks on police barracks in Durango and courthouse buildings in Getxo.

ETA, whose symbol is a snake wrapped around an axe, has killed over 820 people in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings to carve a Basque homeland out of northern Spain and southwestern France.

The latest police operation is seen as the biggest blow against ETA since the group's presumed leader, Javier Lopez Pena, was detained along with three other suspected members of the group in France in May.

'This operation deprives ETA of one of its main tools,' ETA expert and the editor-in-chief of Basque news agency Vasco Press, Florencio Dominguez, told AFP.

Police are looking into the possibility that the unit was responsible for the bombs which exploded at two seaside resorts on Sunday in the northern province of Cantabria following a warning call from ETA, Rubalcaba said.

The explosions in Laredo and Noja caused light material damage and slightly injured a woman who was struck by a rock that was sent flying by one of the blasts. A pregnant woman was also treated for shock.

The authorities seized four guns as part of their operation, including two found inside a rucksack belonging to Goikoetxea.

Police also found maps of Andalusia and its Costa del Sol -- a prime vacation spot for British tourists -- as well as of the Portuguese capital Lisbon, inside the bag, a National Court source told AFP.

Goikoetxea, who is missing three fingers as a result of an accident he suffered while handling a Molotov cocktail, also had three fake police identity badges and an electric detonator in his possession.

He had a beard and was in the company of two women when he was arrested at an apartment in Bilbao, the court source said.

ETA declared a 'permanent' ceasefire in March 2006, raising hopes for an end to the violence.

But an ETA bombing at Madrid's airport in December 2006 that killed two men put an end to tentative peace talks with the government.

Spain's socialist government has adopted a hardline against ETA since the group lifted the ceasefire, arresting dozens of its members and suspending two pro-ETA nationalist political parties through legal action.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero meanwhile has ruled out any future peace talks with ETA.

'Dialogue has proved useless, seeing what ETA has done. There is not going to be dialogue,' he said in an interview published last month in top-selling daily newspaper El Pais.

ETA, whose initials stand for Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language, is considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States.