SPAIN: Fear of terrorist attacks returned to Spanish holiday resorts yesterday after police finally located a bomb planted three days earlier on a tourist beach at Santa Pola, in the south-eastern region of Alicante, writes Giles Tremlett from Madrid.
The 8kg bomb was only discovered after the bombers from the armed Basque separatist group, ETA, telephoned police on Sunday to say that, even though they had failed to find them over the previous two days, the explosives planted on Friday were still there. Police had searched the area on Friday and Saturday morning after receiving a telephone warning from ETA that it had planted bombs in both Santa Pola and nearby Torrevieja. The bomb in Torrevieja devastated a fast-food restaurant, but no one was hurt. The bomb on the beach in Santa Pola did not go off.
After the failure to discover the bomb, local authorities reopened the beach for public use on Saturday afternoon. It filled with thousands of people and was also open for most of Sunday before a second call from ETA insisted that the bomb was still there, near a beachfront discotheque.
Yesterday morning a mechanical digger found the device, buried under one metre of sand. The explosives were packed into a plastic pot which was hidden inside a rucksack. The detonator, timed to explode on Friday, had failed to work. Local authorities denied they had put lives at risk by reopening the beach, and said police had told them the bomb, if it was there, was not dangerous.
- (Guardian Service)