Real Madrid's stadium evacuated after bomb scare!

Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu stadium evacuated after bomb scare

MADRID (AFP) - More than 70,000 people were evacuated from Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu stadium following a bomb scare, club sources confirmed.


The alert came after an anonymous caller to the Basque newspaper Gara claimed that the armed separatist movement ETA had planted a bomb in the stadium which was hosting a Primera Liga game between Real Madrid and Basque side Real Sociedad and it would explode at 21:00 local time (20:00 GMT).


Police informed the referee just a minute before the game was due to finish with the score at 1-1. The players returned to the locker rooms and spectators were allowed to exit by the pitch. The stands were cleared within ten minutes at 20:50 (19:50 GMT).


However at 20:45 GMT, police declared the stadium to be safe, saying no explosives had been found despite thorough searches by sniffer dogs.


Players and pitch officials returned to take their showers and Madrid officials were able to come back into their offices.


Real Madrid president Florentino Perez said that they believed that the alert had been a hoax.


"Everything seems to indicate that it was a false alarm," Perez told Spanish television. "The evacuation went smoothly and without problem. People left the stadium quickly without running and at a normal pace.


"It's the positive side of such an unpleasant thing. Things like that shouldn't happen because nobody understands what can be gained from it."


Officials of both clubs will now meet at the Spanish football federation in the Madrid suburbs early Monday to discuss what should happen now, according to private Spanish radio station Cadena Ser.


One option, reported Cadena Ser, was that the match could be completed on Monday however a Real Sociedad official said the club favoured the 1-1 scoreline being made the official result.


Earlier Sunday two makeshift bombs went off outside two businesses in Spain's Basque country, injuring no one but causing material damage.


Regional authorities blamed the explosions on Basque separatist movement ETA, which has claimed responsibility for a string of low-intensity blasts around Spain that left five people slightly injured earlier this month.


On May 1 2002, just before a semi-final Champions League fixture, an ETA bomb exploded in a car beside the stadium, injuring 17 people.


And in November information was discovered by police that the venue was a possible target for islamic extremists. In March, bombs placed by them exploded in trains in the Madrid suburbs killing 191 and injuring 1900.

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I hate these things!

yeh they do get annoying when ther on the news all the time

Definitely not funny.

i know this probably isnt comparable to such a large situation, but back when i was in 10th and 11th grade we had bombscares at our school every 5 weeks and each time they evacuated everyone

Yeah, at my school too - and they always coincided when some year or other had an exam

But then again it was a much smaller scale, as you say, and there hadn't been such a thing as March 11th neither had ETA given orders to increase violence... (of ocurse ETA was very active back then too).

The thing is, if they start doing fake scare bombs there'll come a time where no one will believe them and they'll do it for real then

^ not going to happen. They need to take every single incident seriously even if a plac egets a hoax every day.

But I digress.

You've got to wonder why they left it till 10 minutes before the thing was supposed to go off before they evacuated?

Yeah - security people will be on their guards any time that happens, but people won't. Come on, even yesterday people being evacuated through the playground doors were taking their time to take silly pictures! People are getting stupid by the day

Of course you do wonder! Also they're saying the basque newspaper that's "friends" with ETA knew it (the bomb scare) for a long while before they chose to let the people at the stadium and local authorities know.

Fortunately nothing happened - if it had been true that would have been hell.

people can fanny around taking pictures if they want but I won't be hanging around.

I was in central station once and there was a bomb scare and I was out of the building with my girlfriend before the announcer had even finished the evacuation speech.

well you don;'t exactly standing round scratchign your arse in situations liek that and i wasn't exactly goign to bolt and leave her there.

though I dunno if i'd be as worried about her wellbeing now