Explosions Rock Madrid

There were five explosions in Madrid tonight, shortly after a phone call made in the name of the Basque militants Eta warned they had set five devices to explode.

The police confirmed the blasts, which reports said were small, and said there were no fatalities. Spanish radio reports said the blasts had caused no casualties or significant damage.

One of the explosions was at a petrol station in the Spanish capital on a road packed with people leaving for the long holiday weekend.

Earlier the Basque newspaper Gara received a phone call saying the bombs were set to explode at 1730 GMT. Reports of the first blast came around 15 minutes later.

Eta, which has not launched a major attack in months, regularly uses Gara to announce impending attacks, and a report of the warning appeared on the newspaper's website. Analysts said that if Eta was behind the bombs it may be trying to indicate that it was still operating after a series of recent arrests of its members and the discovery of its arms caches and safe houses.

Last month, Eta leader Mikel Albizu and the group's most senior woman, Soledad Iparraguirre, were arrested at a farmhouse in south-west France. The arrests were described by the interior ministry as the start of a long-running operation against ETA.

On March 11 this year, 191 people were killed when bombs exploded on trains in central Madrid. The government initially blamed ETA but it later emerged the attacks had been carried out by al-Qaida sympathisers.

Sixteen people, mostly of Moroccan origin, have been jailed on provisional charges of mass murder or terrorism in connection with the train bombings.