A car bomb ripped through a parking lot at a Spanish university on Thursday, injuring 17 people and sparking strong criticism of the Basque separatist group ETA, which was blamed for the attack.
Staff at the University of Navarra in Pamplona described how the initial blast at around 9am set off a series of smaller explosions as several other cars erupted in flames.
“There were other small explosions after the fire set off the fuel tanks in the parked cars nearby,” professor Bernardino Leon told the Antena 3 TV channel.
PHOTO: EPA
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, speaking in San Salvador where he is attending a summit, slammed the “terrorist attack and the blind, criminal and fanatical violence of ETA once again committed in my country.
King Juan Carlos echoed him, expressing his “strongest condemnation and revulsion in the face of this terrorist act.”
Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters that the casualties could have been much worse, but nobody had been that close to the bomb when it went off.
Rubalcaba said a man claiming to represent ETA had put in a warning call to the regional DYA traffic department — a common conduit used by the armed Basque separatist group to provide warning of their imminent attacks.
The man said a “white Peugeot” was going to explode at a nearby university without specifying which one, Rubalcaba said.
The blast comes two days after the arrest of four suspected ETA members, three of whom were picked up in Navarra.
Spain’s interior ministry said the group “were ready to carry an attack, probably in Navarra.”
The car used in Thursday’s attack was stolen on Wednesday evening in the town of Zumaya, Rubalcaba said.
A second professor at the university, Ramon Salaverria, described the intensity of the blast.
“I felt the whole building shake and I thought it was an earthquake. And then I saw a column of smoke about 30 to 40 meters high,” he said, according to the Web site of the 20 Minutos newspaper.
Some 400 people were evacuated from nearby buildings after the explosion, although the rest of the campus continued to function as normal, university director of communication Jesus Diaz said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the