MADRID — Two men accused of being members of a militant Basque separatist group who were arrested last weekend have confessed to carrying out the December 2006 bomb attack on Madrid’s airport that killed two people and shattered peace talks with the militant group, the government said Wednesday.
The capture of the men in the Basque region of northern Spain on Sunday could bolster the government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. It was criticized for engaging ETA in talks after the group declared a cease-fire in March 2006. The government has cracked down on ETA since the airport bombing, arresting dozens of militants and others linked to the group, and it has thwarted several attacks.
The Spanish interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, told reporters that the men, Igor Portu and Martín Sarasola, carried out the attack on the Barajas airport along with a third man still at large, Mikel San Sebastián. The truck bomb destroyed a multistory parking garage and killed two Ecuadorean men who were sleeping in their cars.
Mr. Rubalcaba said Mr. Sarasola told the police significant details about how the bombing was carried out and how the attackers fled that he could not have known if he were not involved. Mr. Rubalcaba said the men were also planning a new bombing on the scale of the Barajas attack, but he gave no details. A local radio station, Cadena Ser, said the attack was to be directed at a complex of shops and office buildings in northern Madrid.
But the arrests stirred controversy when it became known that Mr. Portu had been taken to an emergency room after his arrest with a broken rib, a punctured lung and severe bruising. The newspaper El País reported Wednesday on its Web site that medical reports indicated that Mr. Sarasola was bruised during or after his arrest.
Mr. Rubalcaba denied that the police had mistreated the detainees, who he said resisted arrest and had to be chased and forced to the ground.
“Members of ETA always claim to have been tortured,” he said. “It’s in the instruction manual.”
The police said the interrogations led them to two caches, one in the northern province of Huesca, which contained about 275 pounds of materials for explosives, and another in Navarra, also in the north, which held detonators, timers and explosives.
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