Argus Europe Ltd

A politicians bodyguard has been badly burned in Spain after a bomb planted in his car exploded.There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in the northern city of Bilbao but the regional government blamed rebels from the Basque separatist group ETA. The terrorist organisation has increased its operations in recent months.A senior member of the movement this week said that the arrest of 23 politicians belonging to the banned Batasuna party - seen as a front for ETA - amounted to a “declaration of war”.

The injured guard was working for a politician from Spain’s governing Socialist Party and the bomb went off in the La Pena area. A regional government spokeswoman said of the man: “It doesn’t seem his injuries are very serious, at least not bad enough to put his life in danger. “He has burns on his scalp, on his hands and some superficial wounds on his back.”

Many public figures in the Basque region use bodyguards to protect against ETA attacks. The terror group has killed more than 800 people in four decades of armed struggle for independence of the Basque Country. It called a ceasefire in March 2006, but grew frustrated with a lack of concessions in peace talks with the Spanish government and detonated a huge bomb at Madrid airport in December, killing two people.

It insisted then that the ceasefire still held, but declared it formally over in June and resumed attacks in August, although there have been no fatalities.

Banker Alfred Herrhausen fell victim to a deadly terrorist bomb shortly after leaving his home in Bad Homburg on the 30th of November 1989. He was being chauffeured to work in his armored Mercedes, with bodyguards in both a lead vehicle and another following behind. At the time of his death Herrhausen was a key director (Vorstandssprecher, lit., “speaker of the board”) on the Deutsche Bank board. He had been with Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest, since 1969. From 1971 on he was a member of the bank’s board of directors.

The fatal light-activated bomb had been hidden in an innocent looking school bag on a bike next to the road that the terrorists knew Herrhausen would be traveling in his three-car convoy. In the bag was a 20 kilo (44 pound) TNT bomb that was detonated when Herrhausen’s car interrupted a beam of light as it passed close to the bomb. The bomb and its triggering mechanism were quite sophisticated. The bomb targeted the most vulnerable area of Herrhausen’s car—the door where he was sitting—and required split-second timing to overcome the car’s special armor plating. The terrorists also had to account for the bodyguards’ lead vehicle, and precisely place the bomb-laden bicycle in such a manner that the blast would do the most damage when it struck the side of Herrhausen’s car.

The German terrorist group Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) later claimed responsibility for the assassination and released a bizarre anti-imperialist statement (signed “Kommando Wolfgang Beer”) blaming Deutsche Bank for just about all that the RAF felt was bad or unfair in Germany and Europe.