Paris bakery blast: Spanish tourist killed during romantic weekend on first trip abroad

Last Friday her husband Luis, whom she had met when she was just 16, had surprised her with the news that he was whisking her off for a romantic weekend away.

He had organised for their three children, aged ten, five and three, to stay behind with their maternal grandmother.

Laura, a 36 year-old cashier at a local supermarket in the small town of Burguillos, Toledo had no idea of the destination until the couple reached the airport. It was to be her first trip outside Spain.

Waking in the City of Lights on Saturday morning she was excited to get out and see the sites.

As she was getting dressed by the window of her hotel room at the Mercure Paris Opera Lafayette, in the bustling 9^th arrondissement of the city, shortly before 9am, she turned to her husband and urged him to hurry out of bed so they could go down for breakfast.

At that moment a powerful gas explosion ripped apart the bakery across the road. The blast blew out windows up and down the street an overturned cars.

“Laura was getting dressed by the window, with the drapes pulled shut. Luis Miguel was in bed when it happened, but my daughter was hit full on by the blast,” her father, José Luis Sanz Gutiérrez told El Pais.

“The window frame was ripped off and hit her head. Her poor husband keeps saying that if it had happened either two minutes sooner or two minutes later, Laura would still be alive,” he said.

The father said Laura and her husband had been together since she was 16.

The blast killed three others, a woman living above the bakery and two firefighters who had been called to Rue de Trévise to investigate a gas leak.

Around 50 people were injured in the explosion and around 150 were evacuated from the area and housed in temporary accommodation because of damage to nearby buildings.

In IMAGES: Paris street left devastated by deadly explosion at bakery