More bombs rock Spain during EU summit

Two new bombs rocked Spain's tourist coasts yesterday, making five in two days that the government blamed on Basque separatist group ETA trying to disrupt a European Union summit in Seville. “Terrorists have tried to create a climate of fear and a landscape of destruction,” Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said in the southern city as EU leaders wound up two days of talks. There were no serious injuries in yesterday's blasts, first at Mijas in the south and then Santander in the north, although state radio reported that a policeman was slightly hurt in the second. A British tourist was badly injured on Friday when a car bomb went off in the popular southern resort of Fuengirola. In all, seven people including three children were hurt in Friday's attacks, provoking outrage in Spain as the country ended a six-month spell in charge of running the EU's affairs. “These terrorists are attacking a Europe in which they know they have no place,” Aznar told reporters. In all five bombings, police had been tipped off in advance. “We believe this to be the work of terrorist group ETA,” a Santander police spokesman said of the fifth attack, which came in mid-afternoon in a central street of the elegant resort city. In Mijas, one of the picturesque Andalusian “white villages” that dot the heights above the Costa del Sol near the southern city of Malaga, a small bomb exploded between parked cars. It did less damage than Friday's car bombs at nearby Fuengirola, which injured five, and Marbella, both some 160 km (100 miles) from Seville. Two guards were hurt in a blast at a department store car park in the northeastern city of Zaragoza. Tourism is a major earner for the Spanish economy, with the southern Costa del Sol -the “Sun Coast” -- a magnet for Britons, Germans and other north Europeans in particular. “One would have to be blind...to suppose that killing or trying to kill European tourists would be a way to achieve the solidarity of EU citizens or the sympathy of their governments,” left-leaning daily newspaper El Pais said in an editorial. In Marbella, there was a street protest against ETA, which has killed more than 800 people since 1968 in its struggle for a Basque state between northeast Spain and southwest France. Listed as a terrorist organisation by the 15-nation EU, ETA has been hit by a police crackdown in both countries that has seen more than 100 people sent to prison this year. It spoke of the “arrogance of (EU) oppressor states” in a communique earlier this week that police took as a warning. Aznar, who survived an ETA car bomb before his election in 1996, has taken a hard line against the group and has drawn parallels between Madrid's campaign against Basque militants and the U.S. response to the attacks of September 11. The Basque regional parliament on Friday expressed its “total condemnation and rejection” of ETA's tactics.