Spain: Unemployed man rams bomb car into ruling party HQ

[Murazor]

From Reuters

(Reuters) - A unemployed Spaniard who said he was a ruined businessman rammed a car containing gas cylinders into the headquarters of Spain's ruling People's Party in Madrid on Friday, triggering a police alert, official spokesmen said.

No one was injured in the incident, a emergency services spokesman said.

Police cordoned off the central Madrid street where the PP building stands and shut down nearby metro stations. Bomb disposal experts were examining the car as a precaution, a police spokeswoman said.

The car crashed into the glass front of the building at high speed, entered the lobby and nearly hit a cleaning lady, former Madrid mayor Esperanza Aguirre told a radio station.

Police arrested the 37-year-old man from the eastern province of Teruel.

"He said he was a businessman who sought revenge for current political policy," a government spokesman said.

The car carried two cylinders of butane gas, the government spokesman said. It also contained two bags of industrial fertilizer, El Pais reported.

Spain has the second-highest unemployment rate in Europe after Greece and nearly half of the 5.4 million jobless have been out of work for more than two years, meaning they can no longer claim benefits.

Calling it a bomb car might be misleading, considering the distinct lack of a kaboom, but the guy clearly was looking for fireworks of the deadly kind.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Butane and industrial fertilizer? The former is decidedly flammable, and the latter really doesn't need much convincing to get it to go boom. In fact, it isn't hard at all to turn it into rather powerful explosives. Someone that isn't wholly aware of how to make a bomb out of fertilizer may just go "Well, I know both of these really don't play nice with fire, I bet I can get them to explode by crashing my truck into a building!" Not quite that simple, but both substances have potential to cause one hell of a fire.


I foresee this dude's unemployment woes going away for quite a long time, though. So I guess mission accomplished on that front? Though I'm not so sure prison is going to be better.

[Beowulf]

Fertilizer actually requires quite a bit of convincing to go boom. Even ANFO requires a fairly powerful booster charge before you get it to go off. Typically, it's a stick of dynamite. That, or burning at high temperatures for a decent length of time.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]