The device was built with grim ingenuity. ETA used a Ford Fiesta with false plates, stolen months earlier in the Basque Country, and packed it with fifty kilos of explosives. To aim a car with no one inside it, they fixed an anti-theft bar to the steering wheel to hold the direction, rigged the ignition and gears, and pushed it toward the barracks. The target was a small post that was home to six Civil Guards, three of them married men living there with their families. But the improvised guidance held only so long. Instead of reaching the barracks, the car swerved and struck the wall of a bank down the street, and came to rest looking like nothing more than a driver's carelessness.

That misfire is what makes the Mutxamel bombing so bitter. Treating the crashed Fiesta as an ordinary abandoned car, the authorities called for it to be towed. As it was being hauled to the pound, the fifty kilos finally went off. The tow-truck driver - a local man simply doing his job - and the two police officers escorting him were killed instantly. Thirty more people were injured. The men who died were not the soldiers the bomb had been aimed at; they were the ones sent to clear away its wreckage, caught by a weapon that had already, by its own design, failed. There is a particular cruelty in that sequence - a device that spared its intended victims only to take three others who happened to answer the call.

There is a geography to this grief that is easy to overlook. ETA's campaign for Basque independence was rooted in the far north of Spain, hundreds of kilometres away; Mutxamel is a farming town in the warm huerta above Alicante, its life tied to irrigated fields and, increasingly, to the tourists of the Costa Blanca. Between 1979 and 2004 the province of Alicante absorbed around forty attacks all the same, a distant conflict reaching down the length of the country to a coast that had little to do with it. For the people of Mutxamel, the war arrived as a stolen car with false plates and a jammed steering wheel, and it left behind three funerals in a place that had never asked to be a front line.

The attack did not come out of nowhere. ETA had struck Civil Guard barracks before with devastating force - eleven killed at Zaragoza in 1987, ten at Vic only three and a half months earlier in that same year of 1991. Against that backdrop, Mutxamel was one more town on a long map of grief. Yet within its own province it stood apart: of the roughly forty attacks ETA carried out in the province of Alicante between 1979 and 2004, the Mutxamel bombing was the deadliest of all. For the families of a tow-truck driver and two police officers, and for a town that had done nothing to invite it, that statistic was measured in three funerals and thirty sets of wounds.