Hope fades for Madrid airport bombing victims

03/01/2007 - 11:54:10
Four days after a powerful car bomb attack at Madrid’s airport, blamed on the Basque separatist group Eta, rescue workers were today giving up hope of finding alive two people caught in the explosion.

Two Ecuadorian men believed to have been sleeping inside two separate parked cars were missing in the rubble of the blast, which injured 26 people.

The government has suspended further negotiations with Eta, which declared a cease-fire nine months ago.

At the bomb site, crews continued for a fourth day to use heavy machinery to remove tonnes of concrete and metal at the five-storey parking garage at Madrid’s international airport, largely destroyed in the explosion on Saturday.

“The temperatures reached in the area are incompatible with life,” said Alfonso del Alamo, director of Madrid’s emergency services.

He said some 154 charred cars had been removed from the site, all unrecognisable as vehicles, but that they had yet to find the cars the Ecuadorian men were in. The garage had 600 cars in it at the time of the attack.

Del Alamo added that police believed the men’s cars may have been moved by the shock wave from the blast, and that they may have died in the ensuing fire.

“Although this hypothesis is not ruled out, we still work with the hope of finding the bodies and that these can be recognised,” Del Alamo said, adding that the explosion caused one of the biggest fires in Madrid in recent years

Madrid town hall has estimated that 40,000 tonnes of rubble will have to be removed from the bomb site at the airport’s gleaming new Terminal 4.

The bombing broke a nine-month cease-fire that Eta had said was permanent. Eta has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but a caller who warned authorities before the explosion said he represented the group.

Eta and its political supporters had complained in recent months that a peace process aimed at ending the violence was stillborn because the government was refusing to make preliminary concessions, such as moving Eta prisoners from jails around Spain to the Basque region itself and halting police arrests and trials of Eta suspects and pro-independence politicians.

Eta’s fight for an independent Basque state has killed more than 800 people since the 1960s.

If the two men are found dead and Saturday’s bombings are definitively linked to the group, it would be Eta’s first fatal attack since May 2003.

In the aftermath of the bombing, the government suspended plans for peace talks with the separatists.