A DUBLIN woman and her 10 year old son were said to be stable in a Spanish hospital last night following the ETA bombing of an airport near Barcelona on Saturday night.
The blast injured some 33 people, most of them British holidaymakers. It was one of five violent incidents admitted by the Basque separatists over the weekend.
Mrs Winifred Una O'Mahony and her son, Thomas, both suffered leg injuries in the explosion in the Catalan town of Reus, about 50 miles south of Barcelona.
The duty surgeon at the St Joan hospital in Reus, Dr Victor Santis, said Thomas could be flown back to Ireland by air ambulance within the next few days. He said it could take the boy up to three months to recover from his injuries, and he would be more comfortable in his home environment.
There was an emotional reunion between mother and son after they had been initially taken to separate hospitals. Mrs O'Mahony was brought in a wheelchair to the intensive care ward, where her son was being treated.
He was lying on the bed and couldn't move that much, but his face lit up when he saw her," said Mr Joseph Anon Vera, the head of nursing at the St Joan Hospital in Reus. "It was very emotional to see mother and son reunited. I pushed her chair right up to the side of the bed so they could hold hands and she reached over and kissed him.
"We all admired the courage of this little boy when he was brought in. His left leg was completely smashed by metal which had embedded itself behind his knee, which is also very badly damaged. But this little boy never cried at all."
When first brought into the hospital his condition was described as "grave", but he improved yesterday afternoon. "Tomorrow we hope to put mother and son in the same room if he continues to make the same kind of progress, Mr Anon Vera said.
Members of Mrs O'Mahony's family flew from Ireland yesterday to be with her and Thomas. A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs could not say if any other members of the family had been in Reus when the blast occurred.
Reus is just inland from the east coast city of Tarragone, about 50 miles south of Barcelona. About 1,000 people waiting to board flights to Manchester, Birmingham and Gatwick were in the departure lounge of Reus Airport, after their holidays on the Costa Dorada, when the bomb went off.
A five minute warning had been given and police had just begun to evacuate people from the airport. The bomb was in a rubbish bin outside a restaurant in the departure lounge.
Shortly afterwards, there were bomb blasts in beach hotels in Cambrils and Salou, but police had time to clear the hotels.
Early yesterday there was a grenade attack by ETA on a Civil Guard barracks in Ordizia, in the Basque region. Later yesterday, a bomb was defused after 500 Dutch guests were evacuated from a hotel in Salou.
