ETA bomb in Spanish resort, no injuries

A BOMB blast damaged a fast food restaurant in the Spanish beach resort of Torrevieja on Friday but caused no injuries, following a warning in the name of outlawed Basque separatist group ETA, officials said yesterday. “A device has exploded in a hamburger restaurant in Torrevieja but no one was hurt because security forces had cordoned off the area,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Basque nationalist newspaper Gara said it had received a call in the name of ETA saying two bombs would explode at 1200 GMT, one in the Mediterranean resort of Torrevieja, south of Alicante on the Costa Blanca, and the other 30 kms (20 miles) further north in Santa Pola. The beach at Santa Pola, scene of a bigger blast last Sunday that killed a child and a middle-aged man, was evacuated. Officials said no bomb had been found yesterday. Sunday's car bomb in Santa Pola was around 10 times the size of Friday's blast in Torrevieja and there was no warning before it exploded outside a civil guard barracks, killing a six-year-old girl inside and a man waiting at a bus stop. The child was the youngest fatality since ETA resumed violence in January 2000 following a 14-month ceasefire in its more than 30-year campaign of shootings, bombings and kidnappings to back its demands for an independent Basque state. Torrevieja -a resort popular with Spaniards and northern Europeans alike - hit the headlines in June last year when a suspected member of ETA blew herself up while manipulating explosives in an apartment there. ETA, which has in the past deliberately targeted Spain's tourist industry, does not usually claim responsibility for its killings until several weeks later. “It is clear that the murderous hand of ETA is behind this,” the government's representative in Valencia Francisco Camps told Cadena Ser radio on Friday. The Mayor of Torrevieja Antonio Hodar said the bomb in the locally-owned restaurant had caused little damage and the area had already been cordoned off and cleared by the time it went off. “The material damage is not excessive. The bomb was situated in the roof and glass and door-frames have been damaged,” Hodar told Reuters by telephone. “None of the surrounding buildings has been damaged...it was a small device.” The Interior Ministry said the bomb contained around four kg (9 lb) of explosives. The Spanish government is in the process of trying to outlaw Basque separatist party Batasuna under a recently-passed law. The party insists that it has no links with ETA but has refused to condemn Sunday's killings, giving the government and the courts a chance to initiate parliamentary and legal steps to ban it. News came on Sunday that Spain's High Court had sentenced two historic ETA leaders - known as Pakito and Fiti - to more than 700 years jail each for killing two soldiers in 1987.