Investigation of Bombings in Madrid Yields Conflicting Clues

Friday, March 12, 2004
By Tim Golden & Don Van Natta, Jr.

New York Times Writer

Douglas Jehl & David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article

The antipathy toward Spain among radical Muslims has grown more palpable as the conservative government of Prime Minister José María Aznar has strongly backed the Bush administration's efforts to fight international terrorism and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

People in Madrid lined up Thursday at a blood donation bus to help the hundreds of people wounded in the train bombings that morning.

Image Credit: The Associated Press

NYT
The flood of conflicting evidence and clues that emerged from the carnage of the Madrid bombings yesterday pointed in two very different directions, leaving counterterrorism officials in a country painfully familiar with terrorist violence struggling to identify a culprit.

Just hours after the bombings, the Spanish authorities blamed the Basque separatist group known as ETA. Hours later, the same officials announced the discovery of new evidence they said left open the possibility that Islamic militants had been involved.

"Could it have been Islamic fundamentalists?" one senior Spanish antiterrorism official asked last night. "It could have been. Spain is clearly a target of Al Qaeda; Osama bin Laden has said so himself."

The scale of the violence, the indiscriminate nature of the killing and the near-simultaneity of the 10 bombings yesterday were all reminiscent of Al Qaeda. In addition, the Spanish interior minister said the police had found detonators and an audio tape of Koranic verses inside a stolen van that was parked near the station where three of the four bombed trains originated.

In a sign of concern that the violence might not be limited to Spain, France raised its national terrorism alert from the lowest level. A senior French security official said in the days before the Madrid bombings that they had indications of possible terrorist attacks on railways in France and other European nations.

Yet in the chaotic aftermath of the bombings, antiterrorism officials cautioned that other evidence seemed to implicate ETA.

One Spanish official who spoke on the condition he not be named said the dynamite-like explosive used in the attacks, Titadine, had been used before by ETA, which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom.

Most recently, the official said, the police found the same explosive in a vehicle they intercepted last month as it was driven to Madrid by ETA militants. The police also found bomb-laden backpacks like those used in yesterday's attacks when they foiled a bombing at a Madrid train station on Christmas Eve, an event they linked to ETA.

Yesterday's bombings also came after months of intelligence reporting that ETA was planning a major attack, several Spanish officials said. The timing of the violence — with national elections scheduled for Sunday — seemed to suggest ETA's hand as well, they said.

But even as the interior minister, Ángel Acebes, was blaming ETA directly for the carnage, another senior Spanish counterterrorism official questioned privately whether the Basque group would wantonly kill so many innocents, most of whom were the sort of working-class people to whom ETA's Marxist-oriented leaders have traditionally tried to appeal. The death toll yesterday, at least 192 people, was nearly one fourth of the nearly 850 people ETA had killed since 1968.

(More: NYTimes.com / International)

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Dan