This is stage #15 which was televised last night. Notice how a small portion of the tour actually crossed into Spain?
Posted on 07/22/2003 6:53:40 AM PDT by Brian S
Tue July 22, 2003 09:03 AM ET By Emma Ross-Thomas
MADRID (Reuters) - Two bombs tore through hotels in the Spanish seaside resorts of Benidorm and Alicante on Tuesday, wounding eight people, after the Basque separatist group ETA warned of attacks, officials said.
Local media said foreign students were wounded in Alicante and official sources said four policemen were hurt in Benidorm. Both resorts were packed with Spanish and foreign holidaymakers.
The blasts appeared to mark the beginning of another summer bombing campaign by ETA, which in recent years has targeted the key tourist sector.
Interior Minister Angel Acebes told a news conference eight people had been wounded, two seriously.
Local television showed pictures of a man in shorts with blood streaming down his face and images of smoke rising from the seafront hotel in Alicante, which had been cordoned off after receiving the ETA warning.
The bombs went off some 20 minutes before the warning had said they would, and although police had finished evacuating the hotels, four people living in a house next door to the Alicante hotel were injured, officials said.
"This is evidently a case of two booby trap bombs placed by the terrorist organization to multiply the impact," Acebes told a news conference.
A woman working at Alicante town hall, next-door to the hotel, said a middle floor of the hotel had been destroyed.
"It's obvious that this is about trying to introduce what we could call the annual quota of fear in Spaniards' summer break, which every year they try to do," Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar told a joint news conference with visiting Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.
Police earlier said ETA had issued a warning to a Basque nationalist newspaper that it had planted bombs in the hotels in the tourist centers on Spain's eastern Mediterranean coast.
The warning, delivered at 0900 GMT, had said the devices would explode at 1030 GMT.
"It exploded 20 minutes earlier than expected," said a spokeswoman for the Benidorm mayor's office.
Last summer ETA, which is branded a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, bombed a police barracks along the coast in Santa Pola, killing two people, including a six-year-old girl.
ETA has killed 841 people since 1968 in a bombing and shooting campaign for an independent state in northern Spain and southwestern France.
But given the building of a mosque in the heart of Andalucia, it's clear than Generalissimo Francisco Franco was the last Spaniard who knew how to deal properly with anti-Spanish scum.
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