Madrid Car Bomb Injures 43

A powerful car bomb exploded in a Madrid business park just after morning rush hour Wednesday, injuring at least 43 people, officials said. It was the worst blast in the Spanish capital since last year's terrorist attack on commuter trains.

A warning call purportedly from the Basque separatist group ETA warned of the attack, but officials say they did not have time after the warning call to the Basque newspaper Gara to fully cordon off the area. Nor did they have time to evacuate workers and visitors at a sprawling convention center nearby, where King Juan Carlos was to meet the Mexico President Vicente Fox later in the day. The Royal Palace said the ceremony is still on for the evening.

The explosion came hours after police arrested 14 suspected members of ETA and a week after Spain's Parliament overwhelmingly rejected a plan giving the Basque region virtual independence.

The bomb exploded at about 9:30 a.m., shattering thick panes of glass in buildings and damaging cars. It detonated near a plaza with a large bust of the king's late father, Juan de Borbon, and outside a building housing the French computer manufacturer Bull.

A witness identified only as Daniel told CNN+ television that the bomb shook his heavy four-wheel drive car as he drove about 100 meters away from the blast site.

"It was an extremely powerful explosion," he said. "The car shook as if something had fallen on top of it."

Forty-two people suffered bruises, cuts from flying glass and damaged eardrums, said Javier Ayuso, a spokesman for the Madrid emergency medical service. No one was seriously hurt, he said.

Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said early estimates are that the car bomb contained 44-66 pounds of explosives.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, speaking during a visit to Poland, said "I want to tell ETA terrorists, and those who support them, that there is no room for them in political life nor in society. Bombs lead only to prison."

The telephone warning was received by the Basque newspaper Gara, which often serves as a mouthpiece for ETA. But the bomb went off at a spot down the street from the building where the caller had said it would explode, officials said.

A week ago, parliament overwhelmingly rejected the proposal to give the Basque region autonomy.

The regional president, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, responded by calling early elections for April 17 in an apparent bid to capitalize quickly on Basque nationalists' anger over the rejection.

The party seen as ETA's political wing, Batasuna, was outlawed in 2003 and Spanish officials insisted last week that it will not be allowed to field candidates in the election.

ETA detonated a small bomb in a Mediterranean resort hotel on Jan. 30, two days before the vote in Parliament that rejected the plan for broader autonomy. One person was slightly injured.

The group is blamed for more than 800 deaths since the late 1960s in a campaign of bombings and shootings aimed at creating an independent Basque homeland in land straddling northern Spain and southwest France.

ETA carried out a string of small bombings in northern resort towns over the summer. It also detonated seven bombs around Spain on Dec. 6 — the anniversary of Spain's 1978 constitution that set up the system of regional autonomy that ETA abhors as insufficient.

On January 18 ETA also detonated a bomb in Getxo, an affluent town near the main Basque city, Bilbao.

That blast dashed growing speculation in Madrid and the Basque region itself that ETA might be close to calling a cease-fire. ETA called a truce in 1998 but reverted to violence 14 months later after a lone round of peace talks with the government went nowhere.

ETA is widely believed to have been smashed after more than 200 arrests over the past two years. Senior jailed ex-members in October called publicly for the group to give up, and the now-rejected proposal from the Basque regional parliament to make the region virtually independent is contingent on the absence of ETA violence. That plan was backed by Batasuna.

Days before the Getxo blast ETA had issued a statement appealing to the Spanish government to start peace talks with Batasuna. But the statement made no mention of ETA laying down its weapons, the government's stated condition for undertaking such talks.