MADRID, Sept 29, 2008 (AFP) - A court in Spain on Monday sentenced three members of the armed Basque separatist group ETA to sentences of up to nearly 1,500 years in jail for a car bombing in a busy residential area of Madrid in 2001 that injured 95 people.

The court sentenced Manex Zubiaga Bravo to 1,481 years in jail and Lexuri Gallastegui Sodupe to 1,476 but under Spanish law prison terms cannot go beyond 30 years in practice.

A third ETA activist, Ainhoa Mugica Goni, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for his role in the attack.

During their trial both Bravo and Sodupe admitted they belonged to ETA but rejected the validity of the Spanish justice system, a typical position of members of the outfit which has killed over 820 people in its 40-year campaign for an independent Basque homeland.

The November 6, 2001 car bomb targeted the secretary general of the government's scientific policy department, Juan Junquera, whose official car was passing by when the bomb went off.

Junquera, a former interior and defense ministry official, was slightly injured in the attack.

The bomb contained 35 kilos (77 pounds) of explosives and it mangled more than a dozen cars and shattered windows along the street.

Designated a 'terrorist organisation' by the European Union and the United States, ETA has carried out a series of bombings, mostly in the northeastern Basque region, since it called off a 15-month ceasefire in June 2007.

Its last victim was a soldier who was killed when a car bomb exploded outside a military school in the northern autonomous Cantabria region on September 22.

The attack was one of three in northern Spain over that weekend blamed on ETA and in which 11 people were also wounded.