Car bomb in Spain’s Basque country kills policeman
MADRID — A powerful bomb exploded Friday near the Basque city of Bilbao, killing a policeman in an attack blamed on the separatist group ETA.
In what appeared to be the first ETA killing since December, a bomb attached to the underside of the officer’s car detonated as he started the engine in a parking lot in the town of Arrigorriaga, the Basque regional interior ministry said. ETA often uses that technique.
Amateur video footage obtained by AP Television News showed flames shooting out of the vehicle.
The victim was a member of the Spanish National Police, said the Basque interior minister Rodolfo Ares.
Basque President Patxi Lopez, a Socialist handling his first bombing since taking power in May, blamed ETA and vowed to crush the group.
“We are going to do away with them,” he said. “They have shown us the path to pain. We are going to show them the path to jail.”
The officer was identified as Eduardo Antonio Pueyes Garcia, 49, a married father of two. The newspaper El Pais said he was a senior officer with a unit assigned to fighting ETA.
If ETA involvement were confirmed, it would be the group’s first deadly attack since Lopez’s new, non-nationalist government took power in the troubled region on May 7. That ended nearly 30 years of rule by the Basque Nationalist Party, which governed on a platform that flirted with independence from Spain.
Spaniards have been watching Lopez’s government closely to see how he handles the violent separatist movement, and will do so even more now that there’s been a fatality. His government runs its own autonomous police force.
Lopez’s nationalist predecessor, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, was often accused by conservatives of being soft on pro-ETA political parties and accepting support from them when it suited him.
ETA has blown up electrical towers since the March 1 Basque election that brough Lopez to power, but no one has been hurt.
The group has been hit by the arrest of three senior leaders and many other members over the past year and the government has described the organization as being on its last legs, with little support among Basques tired of decades of bombs and bullets.
“We knew it could happen again, even though the terrorist organization is weaker than ever,” Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, attending the EU summit in Brussels, said of Friday’s attack.
ETA’s last fatal attack was the shooting of businessman Ignacio Uria Mendizabal in the town of Azpeitia, near San Sebastian, in December.
ETA has killed more than 825 people since it launched a campaign in the late 1960s for an independent homeland.
It declared what it called a permanent cease-fire in 2006, but reverted to violence in a matter of months after peace talks with the Spanish government went nowhere.
“Once again, terrorists have taken the life of a worker serving our people, a National Police agent whose only crime was to work day in and day out to guarantee the safety and freedom of the Basque people,” Lopez said.
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