'Football’ was lethal bomb

Press, 31 March 1980, Page 8

'Football’ was lethal bomb

NZPA-Reuter Bilbao A boy of 13 -walking home i from a soccer match was | killed instantly yesterday when he aimed a kick -at a I plastic bag containing ■ a ibomb, police sources have said.

Another boy, aged 12, was seriously injured in the blast in the little Basque town of Azcoitia.

Eyewitnesses say the bomb was apparently planted tinder a . car belonging to a para-military Civil Guard, and failed to explode when the man drove off.

The guards are regular targets of Basque separatist guerrillas. It was Spain’s thirty-sixth death in political violence this year, and the thirty-sec-ond in the Basque country alone.

In Bilbao, police acting’on an' anonymous telephone call,, defused a bomb planted in a cinema where shareholders of a bank were meeting. The Basque separatist organisation,. E.T.A. claimed yesterday that it had killed Enrique De Aresti, the Count of Aresti, because he (had refused to pay the “revlolutionary tax” the organisation forcibly collects from industrialists to finance its j campaign for independence of the Basque country. The Count, head of a leading insurance company, was killed with a, single bullet in the head "as he mounted the stairs to his office last Tuesday. In a note made to some Bilbao news media, E.T.A. (Basque initials . for Basque Fatherland and Liberty) said it had killed the Count-because, in addition to refusing to 'pay the money, he had told I the police about the demand.: