Cuenca, Spain
Spanish police intercepted a van packed with half a ton of explosives that they said Basque separatists planned to use in an attack on Madrid. The van’s driver, a member of the armed group ETA, said he intended to phone in a warning to the target, the office of a right-wing newspaper, so that nobody would be hurt. But Interior Minister Angel Acebes said the bomb was so big it could have killed anyone within a mile radius. “It would have caused a massacre,” he said. ETA has killed hundreds of people in terrorist attacks since the 1970s, but a wave of arrests over the last few years has reduced the group’s numbers to around 200 militants.
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