British police Friday arrested a suspected member of the armed Basque separatist group ETA who is accused of taking part in several killings, the Spanish government said.

The suspect, 45-year-old Raul Angel Fuentes Villota, was detained in Liverpool under a European arrest warrant in an operation assisted by Spanish police, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Britain summoned the Spanish ambassador to London on Thursday to complain about "serious incursions" in the waters off the British Mediterranean enclave of Gibraltar, officials said.

Junior foreign minister David Lidington said recent attempts by Spanish officials to exercise jurisdiction in Gibraltar's territorial waters were "provocative" and risked damaging ties between Gibraltar and Madrid.

Spain has passed a decree curbing evictions of lower income homeowners unable to pay their mortgage, a bid to ease a trend that has seen hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes because of the brutal economic crisis.

Thursday's decree stops evictions for two years of people who are unemployed or who earn less than €1,200 ($1,527) a month after tax. It also suspends evictions of the elderly or disabled residents.

Protesters on Wednesday flooded Madrid in a massive show of force against biting austerity policies, capping a Europe-wide day of strikes and protests.

Activists, chanting, whistling and setting off firecrackers, swamped a stretch of about two kilometers (more than a mile) of a broad avenue from the main Atocha railway station to the symbolic Plaza de Colon square.

Baton-wielding riot police and demonstrators clashed in central Madrid on Wednesday as Spain held a general strike as part of a Europe-wide anti-austerity protest.

Across Spain meanwhile, an interior ministry spokeswoman said that by late morning police had arrested 62 people and 34 people had been injured in "isolated incidents," 18 of them police.

Spain's top daily newspaper El Pais began delivering redundancy notices on Monday to nearly one-third of its staff including some of the paper's best-known writers.

Last month El Pais, part of heavily indebted Spanish media group Prisa, announced there would be 129 layoffs and 20 early retirements, bringing the total number of job cuts to 149 out of about 460 staff.

Spain's banks announced Monday they will freeze mortgage-related evictions for two years in cases of extreme need as a public outcry mounted over suicides by desperate homeowners.

The lenders reacted after two suicides in 15 days by indebted homeowners facing expulsion in Spain, where both banks and borrowers were hammered by a 2008 property crash.

The Labor Ministry says the number of people registered as unemployed in Spain jumped by 128,242 people in October as the country's recession continues to take its toll.

The ministry said in a statement Monday that a little over 4.83 million were registered as jobless at the end of last month, an increase of 2.7 percent on September.

Spanish shepherds led a flock of more than 2,000 sheep through central Madrid on Sunday in defense of ancient grazing, migration and droving rights threatened by urban sprawl and modern agricultural practices.

Many tourists and residents were surprised to see traffic cut to allow the ovine parade to bleat its way across some of Madrid's most upscale urban streets.

Hundreds of Spanish police officers protested outside the interior ministry in Madrid on Saturday to denounce budget cuts and the elimination of benefits, as firecrackers burst into the air.

Like all Spanish civil service employees, police officers are taking the full blow of the austerity measures brought in by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's right-wing government in a bid to tackle the debt crisis.