The holidays of several thousand people were disturbed yesterday when suspected Basque separatists planted three makeshift bombs in a busy Atlantic resort area by the French Pyrenees.

More than a thousand people were moved from two holiday villages near Bayonne before dawn after an anonymous telephone warning to local rescue services that five bombs had been planted.

One device, a tin of petrol strapped to a detonator, was found at a resort of the Pierre et Vacances chain at the Basque village of Arcangues. The 600 residents included French and other Europeans including Britons. All resumed their holiday by mid-morning.

Another device was placed outside the Arcangues tourism office and the third on the high-speed rail line near the Atlantic town of Ondres. The railway device was a small gas canister attached to a detonator that could have exploded, police said. Rail traffic was halted along the coast from Bordeaux southwards, holding up thousands of passengers on 60 trains for up to two hours.

No bombs were found at the other sites – a holiday village at Anglet, the celebrated seafront casino in Biarritz and a hotel and restaurant run by the superchef Alain Ducasse in the Basque town of Biadarray. Mr Ducasse’s establishment has been the target of repeated attacks by groups claiming to be defending Basque identity against outside commercial interests.

Police said that the devices were “makeshift, defective contraptions of limited power” but the action was designed to cause disruption at the height of the tourist season. Nobody has claimed responsibility but the operation had the hall-marks of an obscure Basque nationalist group called Irrintzi, or “Shout”. It has claimed seven low-l-evel attacks or bomb alerts since last August, targeting estate agents, tourist sites and a police station. The Basque nationalist movement, whose Spanish militant arm is Eta, campaigns on both sides of the frontier against tourist development by “foreigners”. Last April, Irrintzi warned local authorities that it planned attacks.

A string of high-level Eta leaders have been arrested in France over the past two years and the organisation opened its annual offensive on resorts with small blasts on the northern Spanish coast on July 21. Local police said that the French action appeared too amateur to be attributed to Eta.

Jean Espilondo, the left-wing Mayor of Anglet, condemned the attacks as the “irresponsible, out-of-touch behaviour of a tiny minority which takes the whole population hostage, not just the holiday-makers”. The Basque country welcomed all visitors, he said.

Michele Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, a native of the area and a long-serving MP there, promised exemplary punishment for “this cowardly, irresponsible and scandalous” action.

Times Recommends

• Air crash: ‘Everything is burnt. It is the closest thing to Hell’
• The true story of a passionate Korean 'spy'
• I shot Lennon in the back, Chapman tells parole board