ORIHUELA, Spain, Sept 3, 2010 (AFP) – A masseur with Team Sky died on Friday, five days after he was taken to hospital with a virus that has also hit three riders in cycling’s Tour of Spain, the British team said.

Txema Gonzalez, 38, died in hospital in the southern Spanish city of Seville, Team Sky officials said.

He had been treated since Sunday for a mysterious virus that earlier on Friday forced the withdrawal of a Team Sky rider, Spain’s Juan Antonio Flecha, from the seventh stage of the Tour of Spain.

Two other cyclists from the same team, South Africa’s John Lee Augustyn and Britain’s Ben Swift, had also pulled out of the event on Monday for the same reason.

The announcement of the death of Gonzalez, just minutes before the conclusion of 7th stage of the Tour, sparked emotional reactions from some participants.

“It’s a hard blow, we knew that he was in a critical condition but we didn’t imagine it would come to this,” the Tour of Spain’s director general, Javier Guillen, told Spanish public television.

He said participants would observe a minute’s silence before the start of Saturday’s eighth stage.

The source of the virus was not immediately clear, but Team Sky has so far ruled out food poisoning.