Bomb blasts TV transmitter

Latest update: 16/01/2009

- ETA - police - Spain

Spanish police suspect the Basque separatist organisation ETA of committing an attack in Spain's northern Basque Country after a bomb exploded overnight at the site of a television transmitter.

Related links

AFP - A bomb exploded overnight at the site of a television transmitter in Spain's northern Basque Country, local police said Friday.

Initial police suspicions on the blast, at 0000 GMT in a mountaineous area known as Santa Barba, centred on the Basque separatist organisation ETA, police said after a prior warning call was issued.

Over the past two months, French and Spanish officials have arrested several suspected high-level ETA activits, and have boasted they are close to shutting down the entire network.

The group has not halted its attacks, however, most recently marking the New Year with a car bomb attack on a regional broadcaster in the Basque economic capital of Bilbao, in northern Spain.

The militants have been blamed for the deaths of 825 people in a 40-year campaign for an independent Basque homeland on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain and southwestern France.