As ‘bomb Gang’ Faces Judgment, Suspicion Still Splits The Country

It was nearly 7.40am and Eloy Morán’s commuter train juddered to a halt, as it always seemed to, just before its final approach into Atocha station, in Madrid. Folding his newspaper on his lap, the 56-year-old civil servant briefly closed his eyes, preparing for the hurly-burly of the day ahead.

“Suddenly I felt a dreadful, dry thump, like the last bang in a firework display but a thousand times more powerful,” Mr Morán remembers, three-and-a-half years later in a Madrid café. “I flew backwards and felt the most unbearable pain in my head, like a balloon filling up with blood. Then there was complete darkness, and silence. No one moved or made a sound.”

Wearing a neat, grey blazer and looking pained, Mr Morán still strains to hear one speak above the high-pitched tone in his ear. His left eye is a marbled, smoky colour, shattered by the blast that day. His hair was burnt at the scalp; his trousers, he recalls, blown to ribbons and revealing his legs beneath. He has not taken a train since.

Still, he considers himself lucky. Others have not left their homes since that day, he says. One woman, Laura, 29, remains in a coma, perched between life and death.

All told, nearly 1,800 people were injured by the ten bombs that tore through four commuter trains during morning rush hour on March 11, 2004, ripping the roofs off carriages like tin cans. Another 191 people were killed outright. Now survivors and the families of the dead are preparing for the final verdicts in the six-month trial of those accused of perpetrating the attacks, expected on Wednesday.

Nineteen Arab men, of mainly Moroccan origin, are facing charges of preparing and carrying out the Madrid attacks – the deadliest on European soil since the downing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1988. Nine Spaniards are charged with providing the explosives for the radical Islamic cell, which left a total of 13 holdalls packed with nails and dynamite aboard the trains and ran off. Days later, explosives were also found next to the high-speed train line between Madrid and Seville, where trains pass at speeds of up to 350km/h (218mph).

Another 11 men believed to have participated in the attacks escaped trial in one way or another. Seven alleged ringleaders blew themselves up when police surrounded their Madrid flat three weeks after the attacks, killing one officer. Three suspects are still at large and one is believed to have died in a suicide attack in Iraq. One more was released from the trial for lack of evidence.

Prosecutors have asked for sentences of nearly 39,000 years each for most of the defendants – a largely symbolic request since, under Spanish law, no one can spend more than 40 years in prison.

Among the top suspects are Moroccans Jamal Zougam and Abdelmajid Bouchar – accused of planting bombs on the trains – as well as alleged planners of the bombings such as Hasan El Haski and Youssef Belhadj. Both men are alleged to be members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group; Mr Belhadj is alleged to be the al-Qaeda spokesman who claimed responsibility for the Madrid attacks on a videotape after the event.

A key figure believed to link the Madrid cell to international jihadi groups is Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, known as “Mohamed the Egyptian”. Italian police said that they taped him in his Milan flat taking credit for the bombings and celebrating while he watched a video of a US hostage, Nicholas Berg, being beheaded in Iraq.

“I am telling you the truth – the Madrid trail leads to me,” he was alleged to have said. In other conversation, he allegedly said: “Those martyrs in Madrid were my beloved brothers. That was my project, a project that required a lot of patience and study. It took me two and a half years.” The Spanish miner Emilio Trashorras is accused of supplying the dynamite used in the attack. All men have pleaded not guilty.

The evidence given in more than four months of hearings showed that the attacks were planned and carried out by a cell with links to Islamic terrorist groups including al-Qaeda, says Fernando Reinares, a terrorism expert at the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid.

“The trial has demonstrated that what occurred on March 11 was not simply the work of a homegrown cell, a handful of Muslims in Madrid,” he says. He points out that one of the men who blew themselves up after the attack – Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, or “The Tunisian” – was part of a Spanish al-Qaeda cell that was dismantled in November 2001. Others are alleged to have been senior members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, blamed for attacks on Spanish targets in Casablanca in 2003.

Three years after the attacks, all the signs are that Spain remains a top target for Islamic extremists. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly cited the need to recover “al-Andalus” from the Spanish, whose Christian armies “reconquered” the Iberian peninsula from Moorish caliphate in 1492. In an address last month, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, called on followers to “wipe the Magreb clean of the sons of France and Spain”.

Since the attacks in 2004 Spanish security services have stepped-up greatly their surveillance of Islamic cells operating in the country. They say that they have disrupted several large-scale plots, including one to ram a truck packed with 500kg (1,000lb) of explosives into Spain’s main antiterrorism court.

“With that explosion, they hoped to kill the people within [judges, clerks and public in general] and destroy the files held against the ‘Mujahedeen brotherhood’ inside,” the prosecution alleged this month. Magistrates say that the attack could have killed up to 1,000 people and that the cell of 30 mostly Algerian men had links to the Madrid train bombers.

Spanish security services have been less successful in defending Spanish interests abroad. In July a suicide bomber killed seven Spanish tourists in Yemen in an attack blamed on al-Qaeda. This week Spanish police arrested six Islamic extremists who were allegedly recruiting suicide bombers and downloading bombmaking instructions. “Spain is one of a number of Western countries that has been singled-out [by al-Qaeda] as a target, along with the UK, France and the US,” says Mr Reinares.

While international experts are increasingly certain about the events behind the Madrid train bombings, in Spain, almost no aspect of the attacks is agreed upon. Instead of uniting Spaniards in the face of a common threat, the bombings split the country along political lines, with a wave of mutual recriminations between the two main political parties.

With the bombing taking place only three days before the 2004 general election, the left of centre opposition accused José MarÍa Aznar, then the Prime Minister, of having made Spain a target through his support of the USled invasion of Iraq. The Government, in turn, insisted that the bombings were not the work of Islamic radicals but of Eta, the violent Basque separatist group.

As the election neared, it stuck steadfastly to its insistence that Eta was behind the attacks, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Police found a van with seven detonators and a tape-recording of verses from the Koran outside the station where the trains had departed. A video was found near a Madrid mosque, claiming the attacks for al-Qaeda. And an unexploded bomb led police to arrest three Moroccans and two Indians.

Polls showed that 70 per cent of Spaniards felt they were being manipulated by the Government, tipping a close-run election against the incumbents. Immediately upon taking power, the incoming Socialist Government fulfilled a campaign pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.

In the intervening years, the controversy has never gone away. Many members of the conservative Popular Party have continued to insist that Eta was somehow behind the attacks, and that they were the victims of an undefined conspiracy to oust them from office.

Victims of the bombings have also split along ideological lines, with some groups denouncing the trial as a “sham” and others supporting the process. Lawyers for two of the victims’ groups tried repeatedly to introduce Eta into the proceedings, earning several reprimands from the presiding judge.

The defendants followed the proceedings from inside a bullet-proof glass chamber, often looking on in boredom, sometimes jostling each other or bursting into laughter. But there was silence during one of the most dramatic moments in the trial, when victims of the blasts told their stories as the alleged perpetrators looked on.

“It was like a dance of sleepwalkers,” said Antonio Miguel Utrera, a 21-year-old student, of the bombs’ aftermath. “Very sad. Very quiet. No one looked at one another, everyone stared into space. I have turned into a misanthrope.”

Main players in the final act

The Judge An unsmiling, dome-headed magistrate with a baritone voice, Javier Gómez Bermúdez instantly reminded Spaniards of Kojak. Kept a tight grip on a sprawling and complex trial that often appeared in danger of veering out of control. The judge showed that he had little patience for efforts to introduce party politics into the courtroom, or for the antics of defendants who tried to turn the courtroom into a stage

The Informant Rafá Zouhier, a former drug dealer turned police informant, connected the Islamic radical cell with the Spanish miners who provided the dynamite. Got into fisticuffs with codefendants and was repeatedly expelled from the courtroom by the judge. In his closing statement, Zouhier thanked the judge “for putting up with my behaviour over these months”

The Miner José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, a schizophrenic former miner from the Spanish region of Asturias, sold the dynamite used in the attacks to the Madrid cell. He claims he is victim of a conspiracy by the Government to pin the bombings on Islamic radicals, rather than the violent Basque separatist group, Eta

“The Egyptian” Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, described by experts as a “true entrepreneur of international terrorism”, was convicted in Italy of links to terror cells in Europe and Iraq. He is viewed as a key link between the Madrid cell and international Islamic terror networks

The “Chinaman” So-called by fellow Islamic radicals because of the shape of his eyes, Jamal Ahmidan was considered to be the leader of the Madrid cell. He blew himself up when the flat was surrounded by police

The Mother After losing her teenage son in the attacks, Pilar Manjón became a vocal leader of the victims. She locked eyes with the defendants during the trial, saying: “I want them to remember my face.”

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