Madrid death blamed on ETA car bombing

MADRID, Spain -- Rescue workers discovered a body Wednesday in the rubble of a parking garage destroyed by a weekend car bombing at Madrid's airport, confirming the first fatality blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA in more than three years.

Though ETA has not claimed responsibility for the attack, a caller who warned authorities before the explosion said he represented the group. The government has accused ETA and even a senior member of the group's outlawed political wing, Batasuna, demanded Wednesday that ETA explain the reason behind the attack.

The government called off plans for peace talks with the separatists after the bombing, which shattered a nine-month-old cease-fire. But leaders of Batasuna appeared to still be trying to salvage the peace process on Wednesday.

"There is no obvious evidence that the cease-fire has been broken," Pernando Barrena, a Batasuna leader, said. "The political process has not been broken."

Batasuna insisted the peace process was not dead despite the bombing because ETA has not formally declared it was ending the truce. It had done so after previous cease-fires in 1989 and 1998.

A Spanish police officer worker looks over the wreckage of the Barajas international airport car park in Madrid, Tuesday, January 2, 2007. Rescue workers keep searching for two people missing in the rubble of a thunderous car bomb blast blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA that shattered a nine-month-old cease-fire, officials said. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

But Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the process was "broken, over, liquidated." Carlos Alonso Palate, 35, of Ecuador, was believed to have been sleeping in a car when the bomb went off Saturday in the garage at Madrid's international airport, police said.

A second Ecuadorean, Diego Armando Estacio, 19, who was at the airport separately and also sleeping in a parked car, remains missing in the mounds of concrete and metal rubble. Twenty-six people were also injured in the bombing.

ETA's campaign for an independent Basque state has killed more than 800 people since the 1960s. The group's last fatal attack was in May 2003, a car bombing that killed two policemen in the northern town of Sanguesa.

Another senior member of Batasuna told Basque radio the bombing had taken the party by surprise -- even though officials recently said the peace process was in crisis.

"Nobody expected an attack like the one in Madrid," Joseba Alvarez said. He demanded that ETA explain the reason behind the attack.

Batasuna and ETA moderates who favored negotiations appear weakened after the bombing. Their comments Wednesday also suggested a split between ETA and Batasuna, which could further complicate attempts to resolve the Basque region's struggle for autonomy.

Batasuna is seeking recognition as a legal political party. During the cease-fire, it had asked that Basque separatists in prisons around Spain be transferred to the Basque region in the northwestern part of the country.

The bombing has left Spain's Ecuadorean community, the largest immigrant group in the country, in a state of shock and mourning.

Palate had come to Madrid with a friend who was picking up his wife at the airport. Palate had lived in Valencia for four years, working in a plastics factory to send home money to his blind mother and others, relatives said.