Car bomb explodes at Madrid's Barajas airport

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Column of thick, gray smoke rising from the blast site

A car bomb exploded in a parking lot at Madrid's Barajas airport on Saturday after an anonymous telephone warning, Spanish police said.

The blast came about 9:30 a.m. (0830GMT) at the airport's new Terminal Four, said Javier Ayuso, a spokesman for the emergency rescue services of the Madrid city government. A warning had been telephoned to motorway rescue services DYA in the Basque region of Gipuzkoa.

Barajas Airport's Terminal Four was evacuated after the warning, state radio reported. Two police officers who were looking for the suspect vehicle, a taxi driver and a fourth person were slightly injured and taken to hospital.

A huge column of thick, gray smoke rose from the blast site more than an hour after the explosion and the building housing the parking lot appeared to be on fire. The airport is not operative, said Iberia, the Spanish flagship carrier that runs most flights out of this terminal.

Three phone calls

According to the Basque radio station Euskadi Irratia the anonymous caller phoned three times. He first called the DYA at about 8:00 in the morning and warned of a bomb at Madrid's Barajas airport's new Terminal Four which was due to explode at 9:00.

Thirty minutes later, there was a second phone call, this time to the emergency coordination centre SOS Deiak, asking to take the warning seriously and claiming to speak in the name of the armed Basque group ETA. There was a third phone call to the Madrid firefighters.

If the blast does turn it to be the work of ETA it might spell the end of the truce, which ETA had called permanent and had spurred the biggest hopes in years for an end to the decades-long Basque conflict.