Thousands of Spaniards marched to protest the Madrid airport bombing by Basque separatists as the Ecuadorean community fretted over the fate of two missing men who if confirmed dead would be the first fatalities ascribed to armed group ETA since 2003.
Saturday's blast, which spectacularly ended a nine-month ceasefire by the armed separatist group and led the government to suspend efforts to broker a negotiated solution to four decades of conflict, slightly injured 19 people and left two young Ecuadoreans missing.
Trained rescue dogs could find no trace of them on Sunday but the search in the rubble was to continue through the night.
PHOTO: AFP
The explosion was probably caused by a bomb packing more than 500kg -- and possibly up to 800kg -- of explosives, city hall experts said. A first police estimate spoke about 200kg of explosives.
The Madrid city government also called off a planned light and sound extravaganza at the central Puerta del Sol square where Spaniards and tourists traditionally converge to welcome the new year.
Reports from Quito said the government had given the Ecuadoreans up for dead, as did the national federation representing the more than half a million Ecuadoreans who live in Spain.
ETA gave three telephone warnings in the hour before the blast but rescuers on Sunday night still had no trace of either Diego Armando Estacio Civizapa, 19, and Carlos Alonso Palate, 33.
Both were believed to have been dozing in their cars waiting for flights from their homeland to arrive.
Diego's father, Winston, told Spanish television he could only pray for good news.
"We're just waiting to see if they find anything, if they find him alive. I just pray to God they find him and that he is alright. That's all we can do, just hope," he said.
As Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero pondered the apparent end of his attempts to kickstart long stalled peace negotiations, the mood was grim as several thousand people marched on Madrid's Sol Square to condemn the bombing.
Zapatero found himself in the line of fire as some protesters yelled out for him to resign.
Other smaller rallies took place in a swathe of other towns.
Just one day before the bombing, Zapatero had forecast that "the situation [with regards to ETA] will be better in a year."
But after the bombing the leader of the main conservative opposition Popular Party Mariano Rajoy urged a tougher stance.
"The response cannot be `I am suspending a negotiation,'" Rajoy said.
"It should be: `I am breaking with ETA, I am applying the law with all parties and all Spaniards and I am going to take the battle to them,'" he said.
Feelings still run high across the left and right divide after Zapatero came to power unexpectedly in the wake of the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, which left 191 people dead and which the former Conservative government mistakenly blamed on ETA.
The trial of 29 accused of carrying out those attacks should begin within weeks.
The separatist organization is blamed for some 850 deaths in a four-decade independence campaign, and the organization's banned political wing Batasuna has failed to condemn Saturday's attack.
Josu Jon Imaz, chairman of the Basque Nationalist Party, in power in the autonomous Basque regional government, pinned the blame firmly on ETA for the crisis.
"The rupture of the truce and yesterday's attack are solely the responsibility of ETA," Imaz told Cadena Ser radio.
He noted that after the "terrible attack" of the August 1998 bombings in Omagh, Northern Ireland, carried out by a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, peace had eventually been reached.
"That could have happened [in Spain] if Batasuna had shown a clear attitude of rejecting violence," he said.
Earlier, the Interior Ministry said the owner of the van blown up in the blast was abducted by an ETA commando after driving across the French border.
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