MADRID Eleven Spanish police officers were injured on Saturday by a booby-trap bomb blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA which is pressing ahead with its bloodiest offensive in years.
Three of the policemen were in "very serious condition" after undergoing surgery for head, chest and stomach wounds and two were in serious condition, according to a statement issued by a hospital in San Sebastian.
The others suffered light injuries, a police spokesman said.
He denied an earlier comment by a government spokesman that two passersby had been hurt, saying all the 11 injured were police.
The blast was the latest in a series of attacks by ETA which has been blamed for 20 killings this year.
The bomb went off as the policemen tried to dismantle grenade launchers near a civil guard barracks in the town of Intxaurrondo, close to San Sebastian. Grenades fired earlier at the barracks missed.
"Everything would suggest it is ETA," the government spokesman said.
Enrique Villar, the government's representative in the semi-autonomous Basque country, said the grenade attack lured police to the launchers where the bomb was timed to go off.
"There is no doubt that the intention was to plunge another group of families into mourning," he told state radio.
The explosives were rigged to one of the launchers and some of the injured were 50 meters (yards) from the blast, Villar said.
The Intxaurrondo garrison has frequently been targetted by ETA during its 32-year campaign of violence for a Basque state in northern Spain and southwestern France.
The base, one of the biggest in the Basque region, was at the center of a "dirty war" in the 1980s when security officials were accused of murdering suspected ETA members.
Of the injured in Saturday's explosion, six were members of the civil guard which ETA considers a symbol of the "occupying" Spanish forces.
Security officials had braced for attacks after the arrests of several suspected ETA members last week.
On Friday, two journalists and a police officer survived two failed bomb attacks on their homes in the Basque region.
Six of this year's ETA-linked killings occurred in October. The last time ETA killed more than 20 people in one year was in 1992.
Spain's conservative government has refused any concessions to the separatists and has vowed to smash ETA.
Early on Saturday, suspected youth supporters of the group threw petrol bombs at the offices of Spanish state radio and television in San Sebastian and bank offices in Bilbao, the latest in almost daily outbreaks of street violence.
(Reuter)