One of those historical events that are kept in the memory of the public due to the impact caused and that was copied profusely in the pages of LA VERDAD for days – to the point of publishing that same morning a special edition to report what happened – , is the reference to the ETA attack that ended the life of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, President of the Government of Spain in the last years of the Franco dictatorship.
At 9:36 a.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1973, the official vehicle in which he was traveling, after attending mass in the Francisco de Borja church in Madrid, was brutally hit by the 80-kilo explosion. rubber-2 placed in the basement of Claudio Coello street by members of the terrorist organization. Curiously, the priest who presided over that Eucharist was from Murcia, Pedro Martínez Cano, born in Rincón de Beniscornia.
The force of the bomb caused the car to rise about 20 meters high, until it fell into the inner courtyard of the Jesuit building, in addition to causing a hole in the road more than eight meters in diameter and three meters deep. The front page of the newspaper contained the first information about the death, also indicating that there had been “various personal misfortunes.” And it is that both the driver and the escort policeman who accompanied him died.
Later it was learned that the perpetrators of the attack had prepared everything in detail within ‘Operation Ogre’, even renting a basement on the same street to excavate the tunnel where they put the explosive connected with a cable. In Murcia and Cartagena, funerals were held in his memory.
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