SIZE DOESN'T MATTER

It was the sound of two small bombs that greeted me as I returned from my break to penning my blog. Three artefacts were placed on a Málaga beach, in Benalmádena Port and on the A-7, the latter of which was deactivated by police.

Although the devices have not been fully studied by the police the delegate of the government in Andalucía, Juan José López Garzon, stated today (Monday morning) that he believed no more than a kilo of explosive had been used between them.

ETA are the presumed authors of these attacks but the government is still not convinced that there is an active unit of the terror group in Andalucía. After the arrests of members of the Vizcaya commando they claimed that Andalucía had been a target and a meeting had been scheduled for August 16 in Granada to give the go-ahead for attacks on commercial and leisure centres. That date is significant because it is the peak of the tourist season and also coincides with the Spanish long holiday weekend that ran from Friday through to Sunday.

These two bangs may have been a reminder that despite the set backs of the detention of the Vizcaya group, the most active of the ETA gangs; the terror group was still around and could set off bombs if it wished to.

Much has been made of the small size of these bombs, the recent one in Torremolinos and also those set off in the Basque region on the Sunday before the Vizcaya arrests.

I am sorry to say that for me the size of the bomb matters little. If you were standing on or close to it then you would have been killed or injured. If you were nearby you could have suffered shock and died from a heart attack. If you were amongst the hundreds that fled the scene on the Costa del Sol and the thousands in the Basque region you could have been injured, suffered a heart attack and died at the scene or days later. If a person or persons plant a bomb, be it a kilo, a car bomb, a train bomb, they intend to maim or kill and hence they are as equally as guilty in my book.

See “Just As We Would At Home” Friday August 8