Spaniards fall silent to remember victims of airport bombing

Spaniards today fell silent in Madrid to protest against the latest killings blamed on the armed Basque group Eta.

The killings were of two Ecuadorian immigrants whose bodies were found in the rubble of a powerful car bomb at the capital’s gleaming new airport last week.

Silent five-minute vigils were staged at noon at workplaces in Madrid to Terminal 4 of Madrid’s International Barajas airport, where Carlos Alonso Palate and Diego Armando Estacio died on December 30 in the blast as they slept in cars.

Airport workers, firefighters, scientific police and cranes clearing the rubble stopped their work for five minutes to honour the victims.

The bombing, which destroyed a multi-storey car park, also injured 26 people.

It was the Basque separatist group’s first fatal attack in more than three years and it shattered a nine-month cease-fire Eta had described as permanent.