Car bomb explosion at Spanish university injures students

A powerful car bomb exploded Thursday at a university in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, wounding 17 people and setting a building on fire in an attack blamed on Basque separatists.

State-owned radio station RNE reported that the injured mostly suffered from lacerations caused by flying shards of glass. Police evacuated university buildings and cordoned the area off following the blast.

An anonymous caller had warned of the blast to police an hour before it detonated. However police took no action because, they said, the caller gave no precise information about where the bomb was to be found.

[q url="http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3753894,00.html"]RNE radio said it was a "great wonder" that no one was killed in the attack

No one has yet taken responsibility for the attack, but the Spanish government blamed the Basque underground organization, ETA. Spanish police Tuesday arrested four people in Pamplona with suspected ties to ETA, and who were thought to be planning an attack in the region.

 

ETA is listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States. Bomb and arson attacks believed to be the work of ETA damaged two train stations in Spain's Basque country on Saturday, Oct. 25, without causing injuries.

Aparicio Caicedo, a 29-year-old Ecuadorean doctoral student, said he was studying in a library when the bomb went off.

"Suddenly the whole building shook and there was a huge column of smoke. It was tremendous, a huge explosion," Caicedo told The Associated Press by phone.

Television footage showed an unidentified building on fire at the ground-floor level and spewing thick black smoke.

a man claiming to speak for ETA phoned a warning to authorities in the Basque capital, Vitoria, about an hour before the explosion, saying the bomb was packed in a white Peugeot and would go off at "the university campus."

Police thought that meant Vitoria's university, searched there and found nothing, the minister said. Instead, the bomb exploded without warning in Pamplona, 60 miles east of Vitoria.

ETA has killed more than 800 people since the late 1960s in its battle to create an independent Basque homeland straddling northern Spain and southwest France.