The white Renault van was parked on the calle de Juan Bravo, a street running along the base of the 43-story Torre Picasso. Inside, police found 950 kilograms of Goma-2 ECO, a powerful Spanish-made plastic explosive, connected to two detonators and a timer. The Basque separatist group ETA had intended to reduce the 157-meter-tall office tower, a symbol of Madrid's modern financial district, to rubble. The timer was set. The Civil Guard’s bomb disposal unit, TEDAX, performed a controlled detonation on site at 9:15 AM, shaking windows across the neighborhood but causing no injuries.
The plot was the culmination of ETA’s 1999 campaign to disrupt the Spanish presidency of the European Union, which began that July. The group had ended a 14-month ceasefire that January. The van’s driver, Ignacio de Juana Chaos, was arrested hours later at a bus station; his capture led police to a second vehicle loaded with 750 kilos of explosives in the city of Santander. The sheer quantity of material in Madrid—nearly a metric ton—indicated an ambition for catastrophic structural damage and mass casualties far exceeding typical ETA car bombs.
This event is obscure outside Spain because it failed. Successful attacks define historical memory, while prevented disasters become footnotes. Had it succeeded, it would have been one of the deadliest terrorist acts in European history, comparable to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The target, a workplace for thousands, lacked the political symbolism of government buildings ETA often struck, signaling a shift toward pure economic and psychological terror.
The interception demonstrated improved police intelligence and coordination following years of ETA violence. It did not, however, end the campaign. ETA detonated another massive car bomb in Madrid two months later. The Torre Picasso plot stands as a stark marker of the scale of violence Spain faced at the millennium’s turn, a day when routine police work and a parked white van held the difference between normalcy and calamity.