Bomb in Spain marks start of Eta campaign

Basque terror group Eta returned to the offensive today, killing two policemen and critically injuring another in a car bomb attack in northern Spain.

The first blast attributed to the separatist in nearly four months shattered windows and set cars ablaze in the town of Sanguesa in Navarra province. Five civilian passers-by were injured.

“ETA has murdered once again,” Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said in Madrid, vowing to use “all means at our disposal” to fight the group and politicians linked to it.

In response to the attack, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar called off a trip to St Petersburg, where he was to have taken part in a Russia-EU summit.

Eta, seeking an independent homeland straddling north-west Spain and south-west France often uses car bombs in its campaign to blast Madrid into agreeing to its demands. It has killed more than 800 people since the late 1960s.

In today’s attack the policemen had entered a local government building to do administrative chores.

When they came out and got into their Citroen car, a bomb attached to its underside detonated, said Miguel Sanz, the Interior Ministry’s top official in Navarra.

The attackers used four to six pounds of high explosive, he said.

An employee in the building said the blast was so powerful it shook the edifice and felt like an earthquake.

Police officers Bonifacio Martin Hernando, 56, and Julian Envit Luna, 54, were killed. A colleague was left critically injured and had both legs amputated

The explosion came five days after Basque local elections in which hundreds of pro-independence candidates allegedly linked to Eta’s outlawed political wing were barred from running.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing.

Navarra borders the troubled Basque region and is home to many Basque nationalists. Sanguesa is 20 miles south-east of the regional capital, Pamplona.

The last attack blamed on Eta was the February shooting of a police chief in the Basque town of Andoiain, home to many supporters of the banned Basque party Batasuna.

The pause in violence had led to speculation that Eta might be observing a truce like the one it called in 1998. But two weeks ago hooded men calling themselves members of Eta appeared in a video broadcast on Basque TV and said the group’s fight continued.