The Basque separatist organisation ETA stepped up its pressure on the Spanish government yesterday with a car bomb attack in Barcelona hours before the Prime Minister, Mr Jose Maria Aznar, was due to visit. The terrorists' campaign is now the main issue facing Spanish politicians, a new poll has shown.
Two people were injured in the explosion, which occurred early yesterday morning in gardens near the Hilton hotel in the city suburbs, minutes after a warning phoned by an anonymous caller saying he was from ETA. The attack was ETA's second in less than a week. On Monday, a car bomb attack in the capital, Madrid, claimed three lives, including a senior supreme court judge, and wounded some 70 people.
The counsellor to the Catalan government's interior department, Mr Xavier Pomes, said shortly after yesterday's blast, in which a policeman and a guard at a nearby shopping mall were injured, that ETA was trying to "spread terror and panic".
The organisation appears to have achieved its aim: the attack coincides with the release of a study yesterday suggesting that terrorism has overtaken unemployment for the first time as Spaniards' number one cause of concern.
According to the Centre for Sociological Investigation (CIS), 70 per cent of a survey of 2,500 respondents cited terrorism as the country's greatest problem, ahead of unemployment and drug and alcohol abuse.
It is the first time since CIS was created in 1977 that terrorism has risen to the fore in the survey. Until now it had only ever registered 44 per cent of the vote in the poll, although it has hovered in second place behind unemployment since 1996.
Meanwhile, the high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon yesterday ordered the detention of the militant Basque separatist, Mr Mikel Zuluaga. Mr Garzon will accuse Mr Zuluaga of being the mastermind behind an ETA strategy for civil disobedience, according to legal sources.
Mr Zuluaga was arrested in the northern town of Bilbao on Wednesday and was remanded in custody accused of being a member of ETA. He denied the accusation.
However, he admitted being behind a document published in 1998 called Pitzu, or "light up" in Basque. The tract calls for "a network of resistance to upset constitutional order" in the Basque region and particularly for Basque identity cards and a parallel state civil register.
The pamphlet came to light in 1999 when an alleged ETA leader was arrested in Paris. "If we've been able to outflank the state through armed struggle, why not drive it mad through civil disobedience?" the document asks.
Mr Zuluaga's lawyers deny that he belongs to ETA, saying that the plan for civil disobedience has nothing to do with the armed separatist group.
Turkey condemned the recent killing of a senior Spanish judge and two other people. "Turkey, which is among the countries most severely hit by terrorism, strongly condemns this inhumane attack," a foreign ministry statement said.
"This attack highlights the necessity to eradicate all kinds of terrorism and the fact that this could be done only through a sincere and effective international co-operation."