Blast rocks Spain's Basque region
( 2002-09-25 11:44 ) (7 )

A booby-trapped sign bearing the logo of the armed Basque separatist group ETA exploded Tuesday, killing one police officer and wounding three others.

The blast came less than a day after two suspected ETA members died when their explosives-laden car detonated in Bilbao.

The bomb was hidden behind a sign placed along a road between the towns of Berastegui at the southeast tip of the Basque region and Leiza in the neighboring Navarra region, the Interior Ministry office in Navarra said.

Photographs of the remains of the sign showed the ETA logo, a snake wrapped around an ax. A ministry official previously had said the sign alluded to Batasuna, the now-suspended political party considered ETA's political wing.

Two police patrol cars stopped to examine the sign and it exploded, killing one member of the Civil Guard, Spain's paramilitary police force, and wounding three others.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Javier Arenas, the Spanish government minister responsible for relations with Spain's semiautonomous regions, blamed ETA.

"We have always said we are winning the battle against terrorism but that bitter times would lie ahead, difficult times, because ETA kills whenever it can," Arenas said.

The apparent ETA activity comes after a rash of high-profile arrests last week, including two ETA members accused of directing the group's commando units from a hide-out in southwest France.

ETA has been fighting since 1968 to carve an independent Basque homeland out of territory straddling northern Spain and southwest France, and has been blamed for more than 800 killings.