Football Fans Flee Madrid Blast

The Basque separatist group Eta last night sent a violent and highly public message to Spain's government yesterday by exploding a car bomb that injured 16 people outside Real Madrid's football stadium just hours before the club's key European Champions League semi-final against Barcelona

The car bomb, packed with 20 kilos of explosives, was parked 150 yards away from the Santiago Bernabeu stadium when it exploded four hours before the match.

Hundreds of fans who had congregated near the stadium fled as ambulances and police cars arrived at the scene. The blast shook the stadium, collapsing part of the ceiling in the trophy room and blowing out windows in nearby buildings, though there was no structural damage to the stadium.

A meeting between Uefa officials, representatives from both clubs and police brought a rapid decision to go ahead with the game.

The Europa Tower, a 30-storey round glass structure on the other side of Madrid's Castellana avenue from the football stadium, suffered external damage from the blast which sent glass showering across a wide area.

The car bomb had been parked in front of the tower block, which houses the offices of a Madrid savings bank.

Half a dozen cars were set ablaze by the blast, sending a column of smoke into the sky which could be seen from across the city.

Twenty minutes earlier police had received a warning from Eta, which had phoned a newspaper in the Basque country. They had just cleared the area when the bomb exploded.

"We surrounded the place and we avoided something worse. We were there when the car exploded," a police spokesman said.

Those injured were mainly caught by flying glass and were not reported to be seriously hurt.

Real Madrid spokesman Joaquin Maroto, who was near the Europa Tower when the bomb went off, said: "I was just passing in front of the tower when I felt a shockwave in my car. I looked into the side mirror and saw a column of smoke. If it had happened 50 metres closer it would have been a massacre."

The explosion provoked an angry reaction from some Real Madrid fans who attacked police, throwing chunks of glass and bottles at them. At least one press photographer and a police officer were injured. Police responded with rubber bullets and chased the fans through nearby streets.

Within half an hour of the attack, however, the scene at the stadium was one of remarkable normality.

Although the Castellana avenue was sealed off, outside the ground itself the build-up to the game continued as normal.

The stadium metro station, which is close to the bomb site, remained open and the numerous vendors selling Real Madrid memorabilia on the Avenida de Concha Espina carried on business as usual, as did the ticket touts.

The two teams, who had both trained at the stadium the night before, were still in their hotels when the bomb went off.

Shortly after the bombing, a second, smaller explosion was heard on the other side of the city in what authorities said was likely to have been the attackers blowing up a getaway car.

The explosion confirmed that Eta, which has seen its capacity to carry out attacks severely restricted by police activity over the last year, is once again operating in Madrid.

Last week Eta exploded another car bomb outside the offices of an oil corporation, just 400 metres north of the Santiago Bernabeu.

The explosion followed the arrest over the past few days of 11 members of the radical separatist Batasuna party who are accused of fund-raising for Eta. Spain's prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, has announced plans to ban Batasuna, a party which has gained some 140,000 votes in the Basque country. Eta has killed more than 800 people in its 30-year campaign of violence for a separate Basque state.