Spaniards go to ballot box

Spaniards voted yesterday after an often-bitter general election campaign dominated by a cooling economy and concerns over immigration and jolted by a last-minute killing by suspected Basque separatists.

Public opinion polls taken before the shooting death suggested a win by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialists, although by a margin that would leave them short of an absolute majority in parliament - as is the case now.

The voting was overshadowed by Friday's killing of a former Socialist town councilor by a suspected member of the militant Basque group ETA. The scale of the carnage paled in comparison, but the timing of the attack was reminiscent of an election-eve massacre by Islamic militants who killed 191 people in a string of bombings against commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004.