Thursday, January 04, 2007

Not much big news around here. The biggest story is that a member of a well-known family in the trucking business named Joan Alsina was murdered inside his luxurious Sant Cugat home a couple of days ago, and they just found the body. The question is whether this was an intentional hit, a settling of individual scores, or whether it was a home invasion robbery gone bad. People in Barcelona are becoming very concerned about crime, though it's still pretty low around here compared to most of the rest of Europe or the US. (Exception: Street crime against tourist victims in Barcelona. That's incredibly high.) There are people talking in the local cafés about how they'd like to have a gun, talk you wouldn't have heard a year ago.

More details on the ETA Madrid airport bombing: They found the body of one of the missing men. The bomb was bigger than previously announced, maybe as much as 600 or 700 kilos of explosive. It did some €35 million damage to the parking garage, which has been converted into thousands of tons of rubble. Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed. Interior minister Rubalcaba announced that the alleged peace process was definitely over, "liquidated," he said.

Five guys were arrested, three of them in Catalonia, for helping suspects in the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings to escape from Spain. No prize for guessing their ethnic and religious backgrounds.

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