Madrid car bomb followed arrests of suspected Eta members

A powerful car bomb exploded outside a Madrid convention centre where the Spanish king and queen were due to attend an arts fair today.

The blast injured 22 people, said Constantino Mendez, the Interior Ministry’s top official for the city of Madrid.

A newspaper received a telephone warning from Basque terror group Eta 35 minutes before the explosion.

The blast came hours after at least 10 suspected Eta members were arrested in several Spanish cities.

Madrid police had rushed to the scene in an attempt to move people away from the car before it blew up.

The bomb exploded shortly after 9.30am (8.30am Irish time) near Ifema, the capital’s major convention centre where King Juan Carlos was to inaugurate a major art show later in the day, an interior ministry official said.

The bomb exploded outside a building housing the French computer manufacturer Bull, he said.

The telephone warning was received by the newspaper Gara, which often serves as a mouthpiece for Eta, a terror group fighting for independence in the north-west Basque region of Spain. The group has killed more than 800 people.

A column of smoke rising from the site of the blast and the wreckage of a blown up car could be seen .

“We have treated 10 people, all slightly injured with glass cuts,” said Javier Ayuso, a spokesman for Madrid’s emergency services. He said a field hospital was set up in the area.

The blast came a week after the Spanish parliament overwhelmingly rejected a proposal from the Basque regional parliament to give the troubled region autonomy bordering on independence.

The regional president, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, responded by calling early elections for April 17 in an apparent bid to capitalise quickly on Basque nationalists’ anger over the rejection.

The party seen as Eta’s political wing, Batasuna, was outlawed in 2003 and Spanish officials insisted last week that it will not be allowed to field candidates in the election.

Eta detonated a small bomb in a Mediterranean resort hotel on January 30, two days before the parliament vote. One person was slightly injured.

Eta’s campaign of bombings and shootings aimed at creating an independent Basque homeland in land straddling north-west Spain and south-west France began in the late 1960s.

The Royal palace said King Juan Carlos will still attend the art fair tonight. He was due to have been accompanied by Mexican President Vicente Fox.

“The explosion was intense. The smoke rose five storeys high,” witness Felipe Alcaraz said.

Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said early estimates are that the car bomb contained between 44 and 66 pounds of explosives.