Spanish dailies El Pais and El Mundo on Thursday questioned the involvement of Spain in the Iraqi crisis after the death of a member of the Spanish military in a car-bomb attack in Baghdad on Tuesday.

The two newspapers demanded in their editorials that Prime Minister Jose Aznar explain before Congress the reasons for the Spanish presence in the Middle East country.

Navy Captain Manuel Oar became the first Spanish military officer to die in Iraq. He was one of the 23 fatalities caused by the explosion of a truck laden with explosives outside the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, on Tuesday.

El Pais wrote: "One cannot continue naively thinking that the 1,300 Spanish troops deployed in Iraq were deployed in a humanitarian mission in a pacified territory."

The daily wondered "what national interests are at stake so as to involve Spain in a crisis that threatens to destroy the existing international system?"

On the other hand, El Mundo affirmed that the United States and its allies turned Iraq into a fertile soil for terrorist activities, a danger that is "more real and preoccupying" than weapons of mass destruction, supposedly owned by Iraq, which served as the initial pretext to invade the Arab country but had not been found yet.

An Islamic group who called itself "Armed Vanguards of Mohammed's Second Army" on Thursday claimed responsibility for the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq.
 
(Xinhua News Agency August 22, 2003)