A powerful car bomb exploded this morning in a parking lot at a university in northern Spain, injuring at least 15 people, according to reports by the BBC, The New York Times, and Agence France-Presse, the French news agency. Late reports in the Spanish news media, however, put the number of wounded at 28.

The Basque separatist group ETA is being blamed for the attack, at the main campus of the University of Navarra, in the city of Pamplona. The university is near the Basque country, the focus of ETA’s 40-year campaign for independence from Spain, a struggle that has claimed hundreds of lives. The attack is the sixth by ETA on the University of Navarra since 1979, according to the Spanish daily El Pais, which quoted a university official as saying that it was “a miracle” that no one was killed.

Agence France-Presse reported that, a little over an hour before the blast, the regional traffic department received a vague telephone warning of an imminent attack on a university from someone claiming to represent ETA, but with no details about which institution would be the target. “We had a call in the name of ETA to say that a car was going to explode at a university, but without specifying whether it was in Navarra or in Pamplona,” an employee of the department told AFP.

The university is a private Roman Catholic institution founded in 1952 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguerá, who also founded the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei. The university was evacuated after the explosion, and in a statement posted on its Web site, it said classes would resume tomorrow. —Aisha Labi