BLAST. Three dead in south Philippines. Three teenagers were killed and at least eight others wounded when a retired army sergeant threw a grenade at a group of boys at a town fiesta in the southern Philippines, police said on Saturday. Regional director of police in southern Mindanao Chief Superintendent Danilo Mangilat told reporters the ex-serviceman threw the grenade after being hit by a rock, which had been thrown by one of the boys. Charges were being prepared against the suspect who smelled of alcohol when he was arrested immediately after the blast in the province of North Cotabato on Friday night, said Mangilat. The military is fighting Muslim separatist groups and criminal gangs extorting money in Mindanao island, which Muslims in this mainly Catholic country consider as their ancestral homeland.

SPAIN. Car bomb explodes after ETA warning . A car bomb exploded at an industrial park in central Spain on Saturday but there were no casualties in the first attack in two months by the armed Basque separatist group ETA. Two Basque newspapers had received calls in the name of ETA warning a bomb would explode at the industrial park, officials said. That gave police time to evacuate the area, a few kilometres from the historic walled town of Avila, west of Madrid. “The police arrived and told us we had two minutes to get out”, Juan Carlos Fernandez, a worker at a printing plant, told state radio. He said the blast occurred soon afterwards. Three buildings were damaged by the bomb, which police believed was placed in a van parked nearby, officials said. The last time ETA struck was on July 29 when it planted bombs alongside two roads out of Madrid as millions of people flooded out of cities to begin summer holidays.