Spain blames ETA for car bombing

SPAIN: The Spanish government accused the Basque separatist group ETA of targeting women and children Wednesday in a powerful car bombing outside a police barracks in northern Spain which wounded more than 60 people.

About 120 people, one-third of them children, were sleeping inside the building in Burgos when the bomb went off at blowing off most of its facade, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.

The blast left a two-metre (six-foot) deep crater in the street outside the barracks which filled with water from broken pipes while the walls of several rooms were blasted off with damage visible to all 14 floors of the building.

Rubalcaba charged that ETA was “undoubtedly trying to kill” people with the bomb as it had not issued any prior warning as it often does when it strikes.

“It was not just aimed at those working in the Civil Guards but also at their families, which makes this particularly despicable. Forty-one children could have been killed,” he said at the scene of the bombing.

“When we deal with ETA we know we are dealing with murderers and savages and now we know that they are also crazed. This does not make them stronger, but it does make them more dangerous,” he added.

Of the 64 people who were wounded, 49 required hospital care, mostly for cuts from broken glass and bruises, and have already been released, the director of the regional health service, Francisco Javier Guisasola, told a news conference.

ETA, considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, has frequently targeted the Civil Guard in its 41-year campaign to carve a Basque homeland out of northern Spain and southwestern France. Burgos, Thursday, AFP