I can add first hand knowledge of this incident because I was at Murcia waiting to return to NEMA.
I checked in at 5 pm for a 7 ish pm departure, no problems at this stage and proceeded to the departure gate. There were about 4 flights due, EZY fron Bristol, FR from LPL and EMA, IB from BCL.
After it went dark I saw a bit of blue light activity on the runway and then the lights went out !!
The tannoy anounced that the EZY, IB and FR from LPL had diverted to ALC (60 miles north) and that coaches would convey passengers to there.
Then a tannoy message said the FR EMA was still inbound but had a 30 min delay then 10 mins later a 40 min delay. I fully expected to hear that this flight had also been diverted but instead the handling agents suddenly announced the flight was cancelled ! with no other information. Were we going to ALC aswell ?? "No its just cancelled" said a very puzzled agent to 150 suddenly stranded passengers. The place decended into chaos as we all had to walk out onto the apron and back through immigration to collect our bags.
I heard one agent tell a passenger that the flight hadnt left EMA as FR had been monitoring the Runway light issue, this was obviously a blatant lie as it now transpired that the flight had indeed arrived at ALC Dumped its PAX and presumably departed empty back to the UK to continue its schedule.
No offer was made to get us up to ALC, most realized they would get no sense out of the Murcia FR staff (to be fair I think they were as much in the dark as us) so accepted refunds.
After about 2 hours most passengers drifted away, probably most, myself included, had friends and family to take them back to their second homes. However there were many families with children who had been on holiday without spanish ties, they were very distraught and in effect abandoned, Murcia airport is miles from any decent sized town so I dont know what became of them.
I finally got back 2 days later via Iberia and BA (ALC -BCL-LHR) for a very reasonable £69, incidently FR had seats available on line the following day (thur) for euro 330, which is very interesting because we were told the flight next day was full !!
I will still book FR in the future because when it works it works well and MOL knows he can get away with it time and time again.