MADRID, July 20: Four bomb blasts claimed by Basque separatists struck seaside resorts in northern Spain on Sunday, police said, in an apparent fresh offensive against tourism targets by the armed group ETA.

The small bombs went off in the towns of Laredo and Noja in the northern province of Cantabria causing damage but no injuries, a local police spokesman said. Two bombs struck a seafront promenade at Laredo, damaging the walkway and a cabin used by lifeguards.

The other two bombs went off in sand dunes and a golf course in Noja, some 30km away.

Police cordoned off the areas after fire-fighters received a telephone call warning them that ETA, which has reportedly killed over 820 people in its 40-year campaign for an independent Basque homeland, had planted the bombs.

The beaches at Laredo and Noja, located halfway between Santander and the Bilbao, are normally packed during the summer but grey and showery weather meant they were not busy on Sunday, a local government official said.

The bombings came after Spain’s Constitutional Court agreed on Thursday to study a government appeal of a plan by regional Basque authorities to hold a referendum on self-determination for the region.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba vowed those behind the bombings would be brought to justice.

“In Spain the best way to secure a long prison sentence is to join ETA,” he told reporters after the fourth bomb went off.

ETA, which is considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, has frequently targeted Spanish holiday resorts in the past.

In 2002, a booby-trapped car bomb exploded near a bus stop, killing two people, at Santa Pola, near Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast.

Simultaneous attacks injured several foreign tourists in Alicante and Benidorm, which is popular with British tourists, on the southern coast the following year, with more light devices detonated in the north in 2004.

ETA last struck on July 4 with a small blast at a telecom relay station in the Basque town of Barrundia.

Prior to that attack, a June 8 explosion rocked the printing press near Bilbao of El Correo, the main newspaper in the Basque region. Both those blasts caused material damage but no injuries.

ETA declared a unilateral ceasefire in March 2006, raising hopes for an end to the violence.

But an ETA bombing at Madrid’s airport in December 2006 that killed two men put an end to tentative peace talks with the government.

The group officially terminated the ceasefire in June last year, and since then the Spanish government has blamed it for four killings, including civil guards, across the French border.

Spain’s socialist government has adopted a hard line against ETA since the group called off the ceasefire, arresting dozens of its members and suspending two pro-ETA nationalist political parties through legal action.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero meanwhile has ruled out any future peace talks with ETA.

“Dialogue has proved useless, seeing what ETA has done. There is not going to be dialogue,” he said in an interview published last month in top-selling daily newspaper El Pais.—AFP