Madrid, July 30: The Spanish government has blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for a powerful car-bomb explosion outside a police barracks in northern Spain.
About 120 people, one-third of them children, were sleeping inside the building in Burgos when the bomb went off at around 4:00 am (0200 GMT), blowing off most of its facade, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.
The blast left a two-meter (six-foot) deep crater in the street outside the barracks which filled with water from broken pipes while the walls of several rooms were blasted off with damage visible to all 14 floors of the building.
Rubalcaba charged that ETA was “undoubtedly trying to kill” people with the bomb, as it had not issued any prior warning as it often does when it strikes.
Of the 64 people who were wounded, 49 required hospital care, mostly for cuts from broken glass and bruises, and have already been released, the director of the regional health service, Francisco Javier Guisasola, told a news conference.
ETA, considered a proscribed terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, has frequently targeted the Civil Guard in its 41-year campaign to carve a Basque homeland out of northern Spain and southwestern France.
—-Agencies