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Spain car bomb kills cook

MADRID, Spain -- A navy cook has been killed by a car bomb in the Basque city of San Sebastian.

State media and politicians immediately blamed Friday's attack on the armed Basque separatist group ETA.

Police identified the victim as Ramon Diaz Garcia, 51, a civilian navy employee, who was married with two children.

The bomb was attached to the underside of his car in a suburb of San Sebastian. The force of the blast threw him from the car.

"It was a loud blast in the area of a barracks and army residences," a police spokesman said.

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Two people, aged 16 and 40, were treated for slight injuries at a city hospital, he said.

If ETA was responsible the attack in the Guipuzcoa province -- a stronghold of separatist sentiment -- would mark the group's first killing this year.

The outlawed group claimed responsibility for 23 assassinations in 2000 after calling off a 14-month ceasefire in December 1999.

"This is a cold-blooded killing that will achieve nothing," Jesus Posada, Spain's public administration minister, told state radio.

"They are not going to change how the government or people in Spain and the Basque Country think about them and about freedom," he said.

Josu Jon Imaz, spokesman for the Basque regional government, joined the chorus of condemnation. "People have to completely reject this type of attack, this type of barbarity," Imaz told state radio.

The government's latest survey says 80 percent of Spaniards consider terrorism as their main worry. ETA has fought 32 years for an independent Basque homeland and is blamed for about 800 deaths.

Demonstrations across Spain were immediately scheduled to protest the killing of the cook.

Reuters contributed to this report.



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