Basque police find 200lb bomb

Police found a bomb in Spain’s Basque region today, five days after a car bombing in Madrid that was blamed on the separatist group Eta and killed one person, shattering a nine-month cease-fire.

Nearly 220 pounds of explosives were found in a drum near an abandoned car outside the Basque town of Amorebieta, and they had been rigged to be used in an attack, a spokesman for the Basque police said.

Bomb disposal experts removed the device from the site and took it to a police warehouse, where they were awaiting instructions from a judge to dismantle it.

On December 23 police found an arms cache near Amorebieta with around 120 pounds of explosives.

The Basque interior department said today’s find resulted from the probe of that cache, and that the new explosives had been ready for “immediate” use and only lacked a detonator.

Police searching the area noticed the car had been parked for several days, and upon examining it found suspicious stains inside. They expanded their search and found the drum with the explosives, the department said.

Just hours before the latest bomb find was disclosed, the Spanish prime minister warned Eta that the government and people would not be intimidated after the weekend bombing of a Madrid airport car park that killed one man and injured 26 people. Another man was still missing and feared dead.

“It will achieve nothing. It is not going to intimidate anyone,” Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said after visiting the site of Saturday’s car bombing, which left the prime minister’s much-touted peace process for the Basque region in ruins.

Zapatero said the attack made him more determined than ever to end ETA’s nearly four-decade-long campaign of violence, aimed at achieving an independent Basque homeland, but he announced no new strategy or even a hint of what his next move would be.

He spoke to reporters for less than five minutes and took no questions.

The blast killed an Ecuadorean immigrant whose body was found in the rubble yesterday.

Rescuers are still looking for the missing man, also an Ecuadorean, but hold out little hope of finding him alive. Another 26 people were slightly injured.

The death marked the first fatality in an attack blamed on Eta in more than three years.

The blast shattered a cease-fire that the armed Basque separatist group Eta declared in March and said was permanent, and has prompted Zapatero’s government to cancel plans for negotiating a settlement with Europe’s last armed political militancy.

Eta and its political supporters have complained in recent months that the new peace process was stillborn because the government was refusing to make preliminary concessions, such as moving Eta prisoners from jails around Spain to the Basque region and halting police arrests and trials of Eta suspects and pro-independence politicians.

Eta has not claimed responsibility for the blast, but a man who made a warning call to authorities before the explosion said he represented the group.

The attack was a political setback for Zapatero, who made the Basque issue a centrepiece of his political agenda and announced in June he would negotiate with the group, infuriating conservatives who said he was dealing with an active terrorist group and should instead work to crush it with police measures.

Zapatero faces a general election in early 2008, and the capital he had hoped to be earning by moving toward peace after so years of bloodshed and suffering has vanished in one thunderous blast. It even came just one day after Zapatero said he was optimistic about the peace process.