Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  In the past, however, it had been unthinkable for Batasuna politicians to condemn ETA’s acts. Batasuna had, in fact, recently been banned. Otegi’s denials were just one more element that made doubt obligatory – at least until the smoking gun, the killer piece of evidence, could be turned up.

  The more ETA protested it was not them, the louder the government insisted it was. They, and anybody else who gave public credence to their words, were involved in ‘an attempt by malicious people to divert people’s attention’, Acebes said.

  As I hurtled back along the motorway towards Madrid that morning, having been caught working out of town, I recalled how the People’s Party had sold a very different line on ETA just a few weeks earlier. ‘ETA mata, pero no miente’, ‘ETA murders, but it does not lie,’ the former interior minister and party boss in the Basque Country, Jaime Mayor Oreja, had said. Major Oreja, a political heavyweight and former candidate to succeed Aznar as party leader, had produced the phrase after ETA called a regional truce in Catalonia. That truce followed a secret meeting with Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, leader of a Catalan separatist party. Mayor Oreja’s phrase was his way of accusing Carod-Rovira of lying when he claimed not to have done a deal with ETA to stop it killing in Catalonia. It was also an attempt to hurt the Socialists, who had Carod-Rovira as a coalition partner in the Catalan regional government.

  The phrase was a reminder of two things: first, that the People’s Party was prepared to change its interpretation of ETA’s reliability as a source of information about its own actions depending on the circumstances; and, secondly, it had fought a significant part of the election on the issue of ETA. This had been the most brutal and divisive part of a bare-knuckle People’s Party election campaign. There had been repeated attempts to paint the Socialists as weak and woolly. Nationalist and separatist parties, meanwhile, were presented as, at least morally, swimming in the same gutter as ETA. It had widened still further the chasm that opened up under Aznar between his own side and the rest of the political spectrum. That, in turn, had set some commentators talking, once more, about that historically spine-chilling phenomenon of las dos Españas.

  Under Aznar, the People’s Party had been immensely successful against ETA. Police action had reduced it to a shell of its former self. Aznar could have campaigned on his great feat of reducing ETA to an increasingly insignificant rump. He went, instead, several steps further. ETA became an electoral cosh to bludgeon others with.

  The previous weeks had been a reminder that, well before George W. Bush made terrorism a major part of a political campaign, José María Aznar had discovered it for himself. Not surprisingly, Aznar was Bush’s most fervent European ally – even more so than Britain’s Tony Blair. He had backed war in Iraq in what was, depending on your point of view, an act of considerable political courage or of immense stupidity. Polls showed more than 80 per cent of the country disagreed. Aznar balked at sending troops to invade Iraq. As soon as the first part of that war was over, however, he had sent enough troops to make Spain one of the biggest forces on the ground after the US and Britain. They wore the cross of Santiago, otherwise known as ‘the Moorslayer’, on their uniforms. Going on about ETA had, deliberately or not, been a useful way of diverting attention from his unpopular, unilateral decision to go to Iraq.

  I reached Madrid late on the morning of the train bombings to find this noisy city in a state of stunned silence. Streets were eerily empty. Everything seemed dulled. I saw the charred carcasses of trains, the fire officers still extracting bodies from the mangled wreckage. The occasional carload of people with shocked, pallid faces drove around in circles as they sought news of the missing. There was weeping, hysteria and anger outside the hospitals.

  The cavernous IFEMA exhibition hall was turned into an impromptu morgue because its refrigerated air could stop bodies decomposing. Forensic scientists and doctors did a macabre jigsaw puzzle, trying to match the body parts of the 191 dead. It was a difficult task. They began thinking they had a dozen more bodies than they ended up with. The victims’ families sat around in grim, grieving groups, waiting for Dr Corral and his colleagues to call them to view the dead.

  The government’s loud insistence that it had been an ETA attack reached full volume that first day. A motion was forced through the United Nations in New York, blaming the Basque terrorists. Spanish embassies were instructed ‘to make the most of every opportunity encountered to confirm ETA’s responsibility’.

  There were other spill-overs too. In my local greengrocers the hatred was palpable. Accusing fingers pointed not just north to the Basque Country, but east to Catalonia. ‘They will be happy about this in Catalonia,’ said one client. It was as if Catalans were synonymous with the violence generated by a Basque Country that lay a thousand kilometres away on the other side of Spain. It was also a sign of how deep the divisions in Spain had become over the previous few years. Two days later a row between a policeman’s wife and sixty-one-year-old baker Ángel Berroeta, who refused to put up an anti-ETA sign in his bakery window in Pamplona, would see the policeman and his son burst into the baker’s shop and shoot him dead. Berroeta was a victim of the hysteria that the government’s response helped provoke.

  An honest and responsible reply from the government would have required it to admit doubt. With the red rag of ETA dancing in front of their noses and three days to go before an election, that was not possible. Doubt was summarily banished.

  Spaniards were getting used to the virulence with which Aznar’s government defended the indefensible. Aznar had been absolute in his insistence that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. His reaction to previous disasters had been to retreat into defensiveness or denial. When the Prestige oil tanker had gone down off the coast of Galicia a year earlier, the government had assured everyone that the oil would not be swept onto Spanish beaches. It would later take months to clean them. When sixty-two Spanish United Nations peacekeepers died in a rickety, Yak-42 Ukrainian charter plane that crashed into a Turkish mountain on their way home from Afghanistan, the government ferociously denied that thirty bodies had been wrongly identified by Spanish military doctors. Eventually, all would have to be exhumed except those who, mistakenly and against their real families’ wishes, had been cremated. An aggressive bunker mentality had become a mark of the Aznar government.

  Later that afternoon, as I was hammering out my own, written version of the day’s events, the telephone rang. It was the spokes-person’s office at Aznar’s Moncloa Palace headquarters, calling out of the blue. The woman at the other end of the phone, who I knew, had been instructed to give me the reasons why the government was convinced it was ETA. These included: that ETA had planned to attack trains before; that the explosives used were of a kind it had previously used; and, lastly, that ETA did not always give warnings before its attacks. The first two seemed good arguments, though it later turned out that the police knew by now that Titadyn had not, in fact, been used. The last excuse, an attempt to head off the Batasuna arguments that ETA did not attack randomly, smacked of panic. Of course ETA did not always give warnings. How else could it have killed 800 people over thirty years? The call rang warning bells. The government not only thought it was ETA. Its cold-calling and panicky arguments showed it wanted, or even needed, everyone else to think so too.

  Within a few minutes, however, the tale began to unravel. News came on the radio about the van that doorman Luis Garrudo had reported to the police. It contained copper detonators of a kind not used by ETA. There was also a Koranic tape. Doubt was no longer reasonable. It was actively required.

  The next day, however, with forty-eight hours until the voting stations opened, Aznar and Acebes continued to spin the ETA line. The prime minister insisted Acebes had been right to blame the Basque group. ‘There was no reason to think that it was not the same lot who had tried before, and there still is not,’ Aznar said.

  That evening, Acebes compounded his mistake further. ‘There is no reason, at the moment, for ETA
not to be the main line of investigation,’ he insisted. Mariano Rajoy, the People’s Party candidate taking over from Aznar, told interviewers from the El Mundo newspaper that he was ‘morally convinced’ it was ETA. Moral conviction seemed the strangest, and least trustworthy, argument of all. Where were the facts? There was still no smoking gun in ETA’s hands.

  More than a million people packed the centre of Madrid that night to demonstrate against the attacks, despite steady rainfall. Most walked, or stood in the choked streets, silently. Only one phrase seemed to bring the protesters together. ‘It is not raining, Madrid is weeping!’ someone said. The great rift, however, was already opening up. ‘¡ETA no! ¡ETA no!’ read some banners. ‘Otegi, cabrón, súbete al vagón’, ‘Otegi, you bastard, get yourself into the railway carriage,’ some chanted. Or, joining together, in order, peaceful Catalan separatists, pro-ETA Basques and Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist party leader in Catalonia, they cried: ‘Rovira, Otegi, Maragall, They negotiate, we die.’ Zapatero found himself confronted by demonstrators loudly protesting at his party’s alleged softness on ETA. But the old anti-war signs calling for ‘Paz’, ‘Peace’, were also there – blaming Aznar for making Spain a target. Some shouted ‘¡Aznar asesino!’ By the end of the demonstration there were loud cries of what was to become the angry, resounding question of the next 36 hours: ‘¿Quién ha sido? ¿Quién ha sido?’, ‘Who was it? Who was it?’

  State television TVE, a faithful slave to whichever government is in power, ignored those who protested against Aznar or war. It zoomed in on the anti-ETA signs. Later it programmed a documentary about the February 2000 ETA murder of Basque Socialist leader Fernando Buesa and his bodyguard, Jorge Díaz Elorza. Buesa’s family protested at what it saw as cynical use of his death by the People’s Party. ‘We cannot remain silent when, in such an artful form, attempts are made to make the truth another casualty of this barbarity and, less so, when they try to make electoral use of the memory of two terrorist victims.’ But the People’s Party had decided, long before, that ETA’s victims somehow ‘belonged’ to them.

  The divisions that, over the next days, would make one friend’s grandmother recall the frightening, hate-filled weeks of 1936 when the Civil War broke out, were out in the open.

  Across Spain, the demonstrations were repeated. Eleven million people, a quarter of the country, reportedly took to the streets. Figures on marches like this are routinely exaggerated but this was, once more, an outpouring of that great Spanish virtue – solidaridad, solidarity. The splits, however, were obvious across the country. Tension ran high in those places already angry with Aznar. In the Catalan capital of Barcelona, Socialists and People’s Party leaders refused to walk together. Barceloneses, whose newspapers and Catalan-language television broadcasters had been more sceptical about the ETA line than their Madrid counterparts, had shouted ‘¡No a la guerra!’ – ‘No to war!’ Deputy Prime Minister Rodrigo Rato was forced to take refuge from the angry crowd in a car park. ‘It [the demonstration] left me worried. I saw scenes of tension and intolerance … more appropriate to a divided society than that of a display of unity,’ José Antich, the editor of Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper, said the next day. In Bilbao, Basque nationalists walked separately from non-nationalists.

  While Spain marched, police were already tying up the Islamist connection. The clues came from the trains themselves. Three bombs had failed to explode. Two were blown up on site. The bag containing the other, however, was not recognised immediately. It was taken, along with other abandoned luggage, to the mass morgue set up at Madrid’s exhibition centre. It remained unclaimed by the families there, so it was sent back to a police station near Santa Eugenia railway station – where it had first come from. It was not until a police officer there opened the bag, that the key element of the future investigation was found. Two wires were sticking up from a mobile phone and a detonator. This was bomb number 13. A courageous bomb disposal expert called Pedro Lorente drove it to a nearby park and defused it. The mechanism for detonating the bombs, it was discovered, had been the mobile phone alarms. These had triggered the detonators, blowing up the twelve kilos of explosives and scattering the shrapnel packed around them.

  Lorente was able to extract the mobile phone. Its SIM card led police to the wholesalers and people they had sold on to. Moroccans Jamal Zougam, Mohamed Bekkali and Mohammed Chaoui, all in their early thirties, jointly ran a locutorio, a shop equipped with cheap-rate telephone lines for calling abroad. Their shop was in the central Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapiés – a melting pot of the capital’s immigrants. They also sold, on the side, mobile phones which they illegally altered so they could be used without payment.

  Only a teenage petty crook, who acted as a messenger boy bringing the explosives to Madrid from Asturias and returning with the hashish that helped pay for it, was the first person convicted. But two dozen people were arrested over the following weeks as the mobile phones led police towards the bombers. The night after the attacks, Bekkali had joined the protest marchers in Madrid, lighting a candle for the dead. That is what his younger sister, Charafa, told a journalist from the Guardian, Owen Bowcott, when he went to visit their well-off, carpet-trading family in Tangier that week. ‘His voice was a bit taut,’ she recalled. ‘He said he had been on the march against terrorism and lit one of the candles. He said he felt very sad for the victims. He was arrested that evening.’

  On the surface, at least, this was exceptionally good police work. It should have made Aznar’s government look good. Instead it made it look foolish.

  Even then, however, nothing was clear. If the phones used in the attacks were supplied by Moroccans, it did not necessarily mean they were the bombers. ‘They were nice people, very friendly,’ the Spanish man who sold crisps, nuts, sweets and dried fruits in a tiny shop right in front of the locutorio told me. ‘They weren’t fundamentalists,’ a couple of their Lavapiés immigrant friends swore.

  Zougam was, in fact, well-known to police. Police in Madrid, acting at the request of a French judge, had raided the Zougam family apartment in 2001. They found videos of his Moroccan friends fighting as mujahedin in Dagestan, Russia. Also, in a clear sign that he was, at the very least, intrigued by the fundamentalist creed, they also found a videotape containing an interview with Osama bin Laden and several books on global jihad. Zougam’s address book included the numbers of several men awaiting trial in Spanish prisons on al-Qaida-related charges.

  Zougam had moved from Tangier, where two of the passengers killed in Madrid on 11 March also came from, with his mother, Aicha, and older half-brother, Mohammed Chaoui, in 1983. He was ten and an early immigrant at a time when Madrid and Spain were still remarkably homogenous places. Back in the Tangier kasbah, however, he had aroused suspicions on family visits home. He sometimes stayed with the Benayiche family, alleged members of the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain (GICM). This was part of the Salifiya Jihadia movement. It had been blamed for the suicide bomb attacks which had killed forty-five people, including many at the Casa de España social club, in Casablanca in May 2003. Through the Benayiches, there were links to Al-Qaida. One brother, Abdellah, had been killed by an American bomb at the Tora Bora cave complex as Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaida fighters fled from Afghanistan. Another, Abdelaziz, was under arrest in Spain for alleged membership of an al-Qaida cell. The third, Salaheddine, was in a Moroccan prison for the Casablanca bombings. They possibly took Zougam to see their fiery preacher Mohammed Fizazi, who was given to urging the ‘assassination of the impious’. Fizazi is now serving thirty years in jail for the Casablanca attacks. Under interrogation Fizazi allegedly declared: ‘I love death as much as the impious love life.’ It was a phrase that would reappear in the mouths of the Madrid bombers, who did not consider their campaign to be over.

  The three arrested men, like many of those picked up after them, had never looked the part. Zougam wore jeans and had a fashionable haircut. Bekkali was a graduate from Tetouan University. A Rea
l Madrid fanatic, he owned a David Beckham shirt. ‘He seemed a completely normal person. He eyed up girls and laughed and played with everyone. He smoked cigarettes, went to the beach, kissed girls on their cheek. Islamists don’t do those kind of things,’ a cousin told Bowcott. ‘You would never think he would be capable of this terrible act, this crime. Those bombs were acts of terrorism, not Islam. It’s a sick ideology.’

  News of the arrests broke late on the day after the bombings. By the next morning, Saturday, all Spain knew that three Moroccans had been arrested and that at least one had fundamentalist connections. Political parties had suspended campaigning straight after the bombings. Saturday was, in any case, the official ‘day of reflection’. Voters were meant to ponder their choice. Politicians were banned from campaigning.

  During the day, however, the murmur of discontent grew to a roar. Opposition politicians had already let it be known they thought the government was lying, deliberately sticking to the ETA line to win votes. A new political phenomenon was born that day – the instant text message demonstration. Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant. The first pásalo had landed on my mobile the evening of the attack. It simply said: ‘A candle in the window for the dead. Pásalo.’

  On the day of reflection the messages became frantic, political and angry. By mid-afternoon, my partner’s phone had received this one: ‘Aznar smelling of roses? They call this the day of reflection and Urdaci (head of news at state broadcaster RTVE) is working? Today, the 13th, at 6 p.m. PP HQ 13 Génova St. without parties. Silence for the truth. pásalo!’

  Demonstrations are illegal the day before an election. But this was a call for one. In the space of a few hours, the messages flew from phone to phone. The internet picked them up. E-mails and message boards amplified the call. New protests were hurriedly called outside PP offices across the country.