Rescuers found the body of a second man who was missing in the rubble of a huge car-bomb blast blamed on the armed Basque separatist group ETA, officials said.
Firefighters yesterday were able to spot an arm believed to be that of 19-year-old Ecuadoran immigrant Diego Armando Estacio. The remains were found inside his car, which was flattened by tonnes of debris.
Estacio was believed to have been sleeping in a car in the multi-story parking garage destroyed in Saturday's explosion at Madrid's international airport.
PHOTO: AP
It could take several hours to extricate his body, said Alfonso del Alamo, a spokesman for the city's emergency rescue services.
Another Ecuadorean, Carlos Palate, 35, who was at the airport separately and also sleeping in a parked car, was found on Wednesday in the mounds of concrete and metal debris.
The blast was the Basque separatist group's first fatal attack in more than three years, officials said. The last one was a May 2003 car bombing that killed two policemen in the northern town of Sanguesa.
Saturday's explosion shattered a nine-month cease-fire that ETA had described as permanent. Until the truce, ETA had kept up relatively low-scale attacks on such targets as empty buildings.
On Thursday, police in the Basque region found nearly 100kg of explosives that they said were ready for "immediate" use, lacking only a detonator.
The explosives were found in a drum near an abandoned car outside the Basque town of Amorebieta and they had been rigged for use in an attack, a spokesman for the Basque police said.
The Basque interior department said Thursday's find resulted from an investigation into an arms cache found last month.
Police searching the area noticed the car had been parked for several days, and upon examining it found suspicious stains inside. They expanded their search and found the drum with the explosives nearby, the department said.
The Spanish prime minister warned ETA that the government and people would not be intimidated after the weekend bombing, which also injured 26 people.
"It will achieve nothing. It is not going to intimidate anyone," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said on Thursday after visiting the site of the blast, which left the prime minister's much-touted peace process for the Basque region in ruins.
Zapatero said the attack made him more determined than ever to end ETA's nearly four-decade campaign of violence, aimed at achieving an independent Basque homeland, but he announced no new strategy.
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