MADRID (AFP) -- Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero voiced ""contempt"" Friday for a convicted member of the Basque separatist group ETA who is to be released from prison, but said the ""law must be respected.""

Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos is to be freed from jail on Saturday after serving around 20 years of a 3,000-year sentence for the killing of 25 people in 11 attacks.
The impending release has sparked expressions of outrage from the Spanish media and associations representing the victims of terrorism, who have called for demonstrations in Madrid and the Basque city of San Sebastian.
""I can only express an opinion: the law must be respected,"" Zapatero said.
""For all citizens, and of course the head of the government, this individual generates a perfectly understandable feeling of contempt. But we must respect the law.""
Zapatero was speaking at a press conference in Palma, on the Balearic island of Majorca, after a meeting with King Juan Carlos at the monarch's summer retreat. He said he did not discuss the case of De Juana Chaos with the king.
The 52-year-old is currently on hunger strike, his third since 2006, in protest at what he sees as ""harassment"" by the media and judicial authorities.
He is particularly unhappy about an investigation into his assets to determine whether he can pay some of the eight million euros that judicial authorities have demanded he hand over to the families of his victims.
On his release, De Juana Chaos is to travel to San Sebastian, home to several of the families of his victims, and may be treated in hospital for the effects of his hunger strike.
ETA is blamed for the deaths of 823 people in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings to carve a Basque homeland out of northern Spain and southwestern France.
The release of De Juana Chaos also coincides with the 40th anniversary of ETA's first targeted killing on August 2, 1968, when a policeman, Meliton Manzanas, was shot in San Sebastian.
Manzanas, a high-ranking police officer who had a reputation as a torturer, received a bullet in his back, and then four more when he was on the ground.
The most deadly attack involving De Juana Chaos took place in July, 1986, when 12 members of the Civil Guard police force were killed in a bomb blast in Madrid.
The bloodiest year was in 1980, when 92 people were killed.
At the same time, it has always sought to negotiate with the government in power.
But talks with former prime ministers Felipe Gonzalez and Jose Maria Aznar and with the current head of government, Zapatero, have all ended in failure.
Its most recent victim was a policeman who was killed when a car bomb exploded in front of his barracks in the Basque Country on May 14.