Aznar finally admits mishandling of tanker disaster

The Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, has admitted for the first time that his government has mishandled the ecological and social disaster caused by the leaking oil tanker Prestige.

Mr Aznar has been thrown on the defensive by the worst crisis in Spain's six-year conservative government.

"It is possible that the government came late to certain situations and that we took wrong decisions, but we have corrected them," Mr Aznar said in an interview on Monday night. Meanwhile, the sunken tanker is leaking 125 tons of fuel oil every day.

Opposition socialists rounded on Mr Aznar for making his first important public utterance on the crisis on government-controlled television, rather than in parliament, or to the people of Galicia, whose lives have been devastated by the oil slick that embraces Spain's northern coast.

Dodging accusations that he failed to react, Mr Aznar said he had devoted the past 27 days to "useful things" rather than travel to Galicia "for opportunist photographs".

But the Prime Minister's awkward excuses revealed his emotional and political distance from those affected by the nightmare in Galicia.

Mr Aznar, who has said little about the disaster since the Prestige's hull cracked on 13 November, is assumed to have stepped forward to salvage the tattered credibility of his government, weakened as each anodyne reassurance murmured by his ministers was contradicted by the brutal reality that local fishermen, and Portuguese scientists, acknowledged from day one.

Mr Aznar finally got the message. "This is the worst ecological crisis that Spain has ever suffered," he said. "We must be prepared for everything."

Mariano Rajoy, the Deputy Prime Minister, said yesterday that the sunken ship, about 130 miles west of Vigo, was spilling a continuous stream of oil, according to a scientific commission appointed on Monday.

The fuel takes a day to reach the surface, which means that Europe's western seaboard is threatened by underwater slicks as well as those on the surface.

Mr Rajoy said the Prestige had 14 cracks, not nine as announced on Monday.

Seven thousand troops with ships, planes, off-road vehicles and equipment have begun arriving in Galicia, to the scepticism of locals. They have been defending their precious cockle and mussel beds with makeshift tools and the help of student volunteers since the oil hit their beaches last month.

The battleship Galicia arrived on Monday at the tar-smeared Cies islands in the Ria de Vigo. "What took you so long?" said a fisherman from Cangas to the ship's Admiral, Jose Maria Trevino. "That's not for me to say," replied the admiral, "but I assure you that we arrived within 24 hours of being sent."

The exchange highlights the truth that will blight the remainder of Mr Aznar's final term as Prime Minister, and could seriously damage his party. Whatever measures he now adopts, no Galician will forget the inexplicable three weeks in which he did nothing.

Members of his Popular Party fear the electoral impact of the Prestige, six months ahead of local and regional elections in which they had expected to sweep the board, especially in their Galician heartland.

Newspaper cartoons abound of a foundering, leaking ship bearing the initials PP.