A reply to the comments of J. Busto et al. on our paper

Although we do not want to continue a sterile controversy initiated by the preceding Comment by Busto et al. to our paper(l), we are forced to reply to a series of statements made in such a Comment, which need to be rectified. It was clearly stated in the Acknowledgements of our paper(l) that ,,the experiment was performed in collaboration, with the Bordeaux group, and thanks were given to be the staff of the Frejus Laboratory. As a matter of fact, the collaboration on 2~ decay was triggered by the Zaragoza group. The analysis of the data was made, as agreed, independently by both groups. We found a small coincidence (~peak,~) effect at about the energies where a neutrinoless double beta decay of 76Ge to the first (2 +) excited state of 76Se, in coincidence with the 76Se(2+)~76Se(0+) de-excitation photon, should be expected. After a thorough analysis of the data (see ref. (1.2)) we conclude not to make any claim of having positively found a neutrinoless double beta decay. The reasons were exposed at length in the above references, but we would like to stress that, besides the small statistical significance (2.5~) of the peak, this effect has not been seen by any of the other double beta germanium experiments, in