Madrid Blast Leaves 2 Missing, 26 Injured

Spain Blames Basque Separatist Group

MADRID, Dec. 30 -- A powerful car bomb exploded in a parking lot at Madrid's international airport Saturday, leaving two people missing and 26 injured. Spain's government blamed the Basque group ETA and suspended plans for peace talks with the separatists.

The blast halted all air traffic on one of the year's busiest travel days and brought a fiery end to a nine-month-old ETA cease-fire and plans for talks that had spurred the greatest hopes in a decade of a peaceful end to the conflict.

"The condition for dialogue was and is the unequivocal desire to abandon violence," said Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who cut short a family vacation after the bombing. "The very grave attack today by the terrorist band ETA is radically contrary to that desire."

ETA did not assert responsibility for the bombing, but a man who placed a warning call before the attack said he was a representative of the group. Following previous attacks, the group has sometimes waited weeks to assert responsibility.

ETA and its political supporters have been warning for months that the peace process was faltering. They have complained that the government has made no gesture to reciprocate the group's call for a cease-fire, such as meeting a long-standing ETA demand for its prisoners to be moved to the Basque region of northwestern Spain from other parts of the country.

The group has also said that continued arrests of suspected members and court rulings against the movement have broken a government promise to relieve pressure on the pro-independence group. It is also angry that the government has refused to allow talks among Basque political parties on the region's future until ETA's outlawed political wing Batasuna renounces violence.

The head of ETA's political wing, Arnaldo Otegi, said Saturday after the attack that he did not consider the peace process dead.

"Not only is it not broken but it is more necessary than ever," he said.

"What happened in Madrid, if it's confirmed ETA is behind it, doesn't take us back to the scenario that existed before March 24," he added, referring to the day ETA's cease-fire took effect.

Two Ecuadoran men believed to have been sleeping inside a parked car were missing in the rubble, officials said.

More than 800 people have died since ETA took up arms in the 1960s, but none since May 2003. The group had continued a series of low-level bombings until just before it declared the cease-fire.