Madrid  - Spanish football has always taken pride in avoiding the kind of match-fixing scandals that have so afflicted Italy and other countries.

No major players have ever been banned, let alone jailed, and no clubs have ever been relegated for fixing results.

There have occasionally been rumours and whispers of attempted bribery, but practically nothing has ever reached the public domain.

Until now, that is.

This week La Liga has been shaken up by two separate allegations of match-fixing.

Madrid - Prosecutors at Spain's National Court on Thursday asked judge Ismael Moreno to widen his investigation into alleged US flights transporting terrorism suspects via Spain to the prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The prosecutors urged Moreno to question the author of a top secret Foreign Ministry document which was published by the daily El Pais.

The 2002 document indicates that former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government gave the United States permission to secretly transport Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan via Spain to Guantanamo.

Madrid - Thousands of Spaniards around the country Thursday staged silent rallies to protest the killing of entrepreneur Ignacio Uria by suspected members of the militant Basque separatist group ETA.

Uria, 71, was gunned down in Azpeitia in the Basque region on Wednesday.

ETA was believed to have targeted him as one of the heads of a company participating in the construction of a high-speed railway which the group opposed on ecological and political grounds.

Protesters gathered in front of city halls while parliament and regional institutions also observed a moment of silence.

Barcelona - One of the 18 people who were in a critical condition following a gas explosion in their block of flats in north- eastern Spain died on Thursday, regional health officials said.

The 60-year-old woman had burns to 85 per cent of her body.

Twenty-two of the 27 injured victims remained at hospital. They included eight children, five of whom were described as being in a very serious condition.

A gas explosion caused a three-storey building to partially collapse and sparked a fire in the low-income locality of Gava near Barcelona on Wednesday.

Madrid - The big football game in Spain this weekend sees runaway leaders Barcelona at home to rugged Valencia on Saturday.

Barca are four points above second-placed Villarreal in La Liga, with Valencia five points behind them in third place.

Valencia will make the trip to the Camp Nou - where they were thrashed 6-0 last season - without captain Carlos Marchena who was sent off in last Sunday's 3-2 defeat of Betis.

In addition, Brazilian midfielder Edu and Spain striker David Silva are injured.

"It's going to be a difficult game for us," said old Valencia warhorse Ruben Baraja.

"But we have got fairly good results there in the past few years, and I think we can do this again on Saturday."

Madrid  - A decades-old row over whether crucifixes should be displayed in public buildings in a non-confessional state has erupted again in Spain.

The recurrence of the "war of the crucifix" was seen by many analysts as partly reflecting a certain indecisiveness of the authorities caught between Spain's traditionally Catholic identity and an increasingly secular society.