SANTA POLA, Spain -- The Spanish resort of Santa Pola on Monday will bury two victims of a car bomb blamed on the Basque separatists ETA, including a six-year-old girl.

The blast ripped through a police barracks in the fishing and tourist town on Spain's southeastern Mediterranean coast, coming in the peak holiday month of August.

Another 45 people were injured. Three people, including a two-year-old boy, remained in hospital, Reuters reported.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but police, the prime minister and local officials immediately blamed ETA, which typically waits several weeks before claiming its attacks.

The girl killed in the blast, the daughter of a civil guard police officer, was the youngest victim to die since ETA resumed violence in January 2000 following a 14-month cease-fire. A 57-year-old man identified as Cecilio Gallego was also killed.

ETA has killed more than 800 people since 1968 in its campaign for an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southwestern France.

This marked the first lethal attack blamed on ETA in nearly six months. Socialist politician Juan Priede, 69, was shot dead in a bar in March in the Basque town of Orio.

Before the latest attack ETA had claimed 39 killings since ending its cease-fire, making it the most active guerrilla group in Western Europe and earning it the label of a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

The joint funeral of the two victims is due to take place this evening. Hundreds of people took part in a silent protest in the town center and demonstrations across Spain are planned on Monday and Tuesday.

At the site of the bomb, passers-by and shopkeepers trod gingerly over glass as they attempted to go about their daily business.

"I wish the ETA member was in the car when it exploded," one onlooker said.

------------------- Power of the Blast ---------------- The force of the blast tore the facade off a four-story building in the barracks, exposing the staircase and the inside of the flats. "It felt like a earthquake," said housewife Toni Sevilla, who was at home about 200 yards (meters) from the scene of the attack. "I ran out and there were people screaming."

Residents of nearby flats spent the night in hotels and were still barred from returning home on Monday morning.

ETA has frequently targeted tourist areas, as it did when setting off five bombs during a European Union summit in Spain in June.

But rarely have such attacks claimed victims because they usually call to warn police some minutes before the explosion, and foreign tourists continued to flock to Spain.

In this case, no warning was given, and many of the injured were waiting at a nearby bus stop in town.

"There will be a price to pay ... already in July there was a three percent fall in hotels and apartment buildings (in Santa Pola)," said Mayor Francisco Conejero. ---------------- Basque Condemnation ---------------------- The head of the mainstream nationalist Basque regional government, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, lashed out at ETA's "inhumanity and barbarity."

"We have to reject and combat ETA together. We have to let ETA know that killing doesn't get anyone anywhere, but we also have to talk sensibly amongst politicians and about politics," he said.

Spain's center-right government has taken a hard line against ETA, but it is also at odds with Ibarretxe's government and mainstream Basque nationalists, some of whom share ETA's goal of winning independence from Madrid.