US embassy cables: Family of Spanish cameraman considers legal action

Family of television cameraman killed by US troops in Iraq might sue those who worked with US to prevent soldiers' arrest

The Hotel Palestine several months after the bomb in which José Couso died. Photograph: Jerome Sessini/ In Visu/Corbis

The family of a television cameraman killed by US troops during the invasion of Iraq said it was considering taking legal action against Spanish ministers and others who worked with US officials to prevent a Madrid court arresting the soldiers involved.

The brother of cameraman José Couso, who died after a tank opened fire on a journalists' hotel in Baghdad, said the family was mulling court action after US embassy cables published by the Guardian and El País revealed how Spanish ministers intervened after a Madrid court issued arrest warrants for three soldiers.

"We have always known that the Spanish government connived [with the US]," Couso's brother Javier said. "What I ask myself now is whatever happened to our national sovereignty?"

Couso, who worked for Spain's Tele 5, and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk were killed when a US tank opened fire on the Hotel Palestine on 8 April 2003.

In October 2005 a Madrid court ordered the arrest for questioning of three US soldiers and issued an international warrant for them.

Spain's attorney general's office appealed against the measures and the case has since been shelved.

Couso's family is fighting for the case to be reopened. "We believe the behaviour of the attorney general's office and of prosecutors office at the national court has perverted the true nature of these institutions," Javier Couso said.

Spain's governing socialist party and the opposition People's Party, both of which have been embarrassed by the cables, have remained tight-lipped. Socialist ministers have called the Madrid cables – which deal with US attempts to stop court investigations into torture at Guantánamo Bay, CIA rendition flights and the Couso case – as "decontextualised" and "partial".

Ministers have also denied that Spain was offered $85,000m (£54,000) to cover the costs of each former Guantánamo prisoner it accepted.

Javier Zaragoza, the chief prosecutor at the national court, who comes across in the cables as a close ally of the US as it tried to stop investigating magistrates using universal jurisdiction rules to investigate torture at Guantánamo Bay, said the reports of conversations contained in the cables were "biased" and "malicious".

"They come to ask you for information, not to tell you what you should do," he said in an interview with La Voz newspaper. "The thing is that they always try to make themselves look valuable to their government, but they never set the course of action followed by prosecutors or the justice system in Spain."

In an editorial, El País asked for a "clear explanation" of the contacts between prosecutors, ministers and the US embassy in Madrid.