-Rabei Osman El Sayed Ahmed, alleged mastermind of the Madrid train bombings (Milan, May 26, 2004)
AL QAEDA ENTERS POLITICS
"We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure."' This view was expressed in a very complete and sophisticated political analysis of the war in Iraq circulating on the Internet, titled "Jihadi Iraq, Hopes and Dangers"; it was discovered in December 2003 by the Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt, a Norwegian research institute. Released by the mysterious "Media Committee for the Victory of the Iraqi People (Mujaheddin Services Center)," the forty-twopage Arabic document resembled previous writings and communiques of al Qaeda-linked groups in its style and ideology; while its real authorship is unknown, it is to have been written by an astute political analyst within al Qaeda. Initially, authorities paid the text little attention; but a few months later, they realized that it outlined al Qaeda's global strategy.
Starting from the premise that "America cannot be coerced to leave Iraq by military-political means alone, but the Islamist resistance can succeed if it makes the occupation of Iraq as costly as possible-in economic terms-for the United States," "Jihadi Iraq" provided various recommendations on how to make the occupation too expensive. The best solution, the author argued, was to attack the fragile coalition put together by the Bush administration, as he believed that, in the long term, the United States could not afford the occupation alone. After offering an informed and thorough analysis of the internal situation of three of the main European countries providing troops to the coalition, he concluded that the United Kingdom and Poland were unlikely to withdraw their support easily, despite the widespread domestic opposition to the war, and Spain was the alliance's weakest link. The document noted that "[then Prime Minister Jose Maria] Aznar's position does not express the Spanish popular stance," and pointed to the weakness of the leftist opposition, the power of the Catholic Church, the youth of the Spanish democracy, and the "lack of direct influence of the event[s] in Iraq on life in Spain" to explain why the Aznar government was still in power despite popular discontent over the US-led war in Iraq. "Therefore we say that in order to force the Spanish government to withdraw from Iraq the resistance should deal painful blows to its forces. This should be accompanied by an information campaign clarifying the truth of the matter inside Iraq. It is necessary to make the utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain in March next year."'
At the time of the document's discovery, Spanish forces in Iraq had already been hit hard by the insurgency. In October 2003, a Spanish diplomat was executed by three gunmen outside his Baghdad house.3 A month later, seven agents from Spain's National Intelligence Center were massacred after their convoy was attacked about thirty kilometers south of Baghdad.4 The pictures of Iraqi children kicking the dead bodies of the agents near their burning cars shocked Spain, but Aznar's resolution to keep the country's thirteen hundred troops in Iraq did not falter.
Then came the fatal morning of March 11, 2004. Between 7:37 and 7:42 AM, ten bombs exploded on commuter trains traveling from the eastern suburbs of Madrid to the Spanish capital's city center. Seven bombs went off on two trains about to enter the Atocha Station, in the heart of Madrid, sending body parts through windows of nearby apartments.' The Atocha bombs killed nearly a hundred people, but the carnage would have been immensely worse had the explosions occurred only a few minutes later, when the trains had reached the station. According to Spanish authorities, detonation of the bombs inside Atocha would probably have caused part of the old station to collapse, perhaps killing tens of thousands of commuters (more than a quarter of a million pass through Atocha every workday). Two more bombs went off in El Pozo and one in Santa Eugenia, two suburban stations on the route that takes commuters to Atocha from the town of Alcala de Henares. In a span of less than five minutes, the explosions had killed 191 people and injured more than fifteen hundred.'
As emergency workers fought to rescue the injured and collected body parts from the tracks, Spanish authorities tried to understand what had happened. For decades Spain had been battling internal terrorist actions launched by ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Liberty), a Basque separatist group. Though the Aznar government's aggressive campaign had recently managed to cripple ETA, remnants of the organizations were still active and, according to Spanish authorities, determined to strike. Just three months earlier, Spanish authorities had arrested two ETA operatives who were planting backpack bombs on trains.7 ETA seemed the logical culprit, and within hours the Spanish gov ernment was publicly announcing that it was behind the attacks. At 1:30 PM, Interior Minister Angel Acebes declared that with the train attacks, "ETA had achieved its objective." At the same time, Prime Minister Aznar instructed the Spanish delegation at the United Nations to introduce a resolution condemning the Basque terrorist group. 8
Nevertheless, even before the investigation began, some Spanish officials doubted that ETA could be responsible. ETA's bombing campaigns as rule have had low casualties, because the group routinely telephones authorities to warn that an explosion is about to take place. ETA generally preferred more targeted attacks, attacking government officials and the Spanish elite and sparing members of the working class. Moreover, intercepted phone calls between known ETA members in the immediate wake of the attacks revealed that they came as a surprise to all of them.9
In the early afternoon, authorities began to gather information that might have suggested a different lead. At 10:50 AM, a resident of Alcala de Henares, the station from which all the bombed trains had left, called the police to report a suspicious vehicle parked across the street from the local train station. Agents examining the Kangoo van found out that its plates did not match the vehicle's registration. A quick inspection of the van's interior revealed nothing sensitive, but the vehicle was nevertheless impounded. A few hours later, investigators searching more carefully found a plastic bag with seven detonators under the passenger seat. In addition, the van's cassette player held a tape with Arabic inscriptions on its case that contained recitations of Quranic verses.10
By the evening, Aznar had given information about the tape to the opposition's leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, and to the publishers of the country's main newspapers, while maintaining that ETA was still the primary suspect. A few hours later, the Abu Hats al Masri Brigades, a group that claimed to speak on behalf of al Qaeda, issued a communique proudly asserting its responsibility for the attacks: "The squadron of death has managed to penetrate in the heart of Crusader Europe, striking one of the pillars of the Crusaders and their allies, Spain, with a painful blow. This is part of an old game with Crusader Spain, ally of America in its war against Islam."11 Its claim was considered "unreliable" by the Spanish government, which publicly announced that a connection to ETA was the most "logical." 12 There was good reason to be suspicious of claims by the Abu Hafs al Masri Brigades, which is not considered to be a functioning organization; moreover, it had already issued a demonstrably false statement in August 2003, when it claimed responsibility for a major blackout in the northeastern United States that was in fact caused by an overload in the grid and communications failures.
Police had a break in their case early in the morning of March 12, when a young officer sorting through the personal effects of the victims in the El Pozo station found a sports bag. The bag contained a Motorola mobile phone that was connected by two wires to ten kilograms of explosives. The type of explosive found was Goma 2 ECO, a Spanish brand used in the bombs that had detonated.13 The bag was also filled with nails and screws, objects commonly added to increase the deadliness of an explosion. Once activated from a distance by a second telephone, the cell phone was supposed to send an electronic signal to the detonator. While the other ten bags had exploded, this one did not. Investigators had found the key to solving the case.
The discovery of the bag was initially kept secret, as investigators ga
thered clues from the SIM card found inside the cell phone and the fingerprints on the bag and in the van. Even though ETA sent various media outlets a number of communiques strongly denying any involvement in the attacks, the Aznar government kept blaming the Basque group. In the meantime, Spain was a country in shock. Spontaneous rallies brought life in Madrid and other cities to a halt, as one in four Spaniards participated in emotional vigils and shows of support for the victims throughout the country. And as Spain was grappling with its sorrow, it was also getting ready for the general national elections, due to take place on Sunday, March 14.
The events of Saturday the 13th changed Spain once again. Early in the morning, police managed to trace the phone card to a shop owned by two Indian immigrants in Alcorcon, a Madrid neighborhood. The Indians told the counterterrorism police that the SIM card found in the unexploded bag was from a stock of thirty cards they had sold to a Moroccan immigrant who owned a small shop in Lavapies, an immigrant neighbor hood located not far from the Atocha Station.14 At 4 PM, Spanish police arrested the owner of the shop, Jamal Zougam, and two other Moroccan citizens, Mohammed Bekkali Boutaliha and Zougam's half-brother, Mohammed Chaoui.'S They were detained, together with the two Indians, for what Interior Minister Acebes called "their presumed implication in the sale and falsification of the cell phone and cell phone card found in the bag which did not explode."16 As media began to spread the information that Zougam had been linked in the past to Islamic fundamentalists operating in the Madrid area, more than three thousand protesters began to gather in front of the government party's headquarters in Madrid, shouting that they demanded "the truth before going to vote."17
Just before 8 PM, an anonymous phone call informed the TV station Telemadrid that a tape had been left in a trash bin near one of Madrid's main mosques. Alerted by the station, police retrieved the tape. On the tape, a man speaking Arabic with an unmistakable Moroccan accent who identified himself as Abu Dujan al Afgani, the military spokesman for al Qaeda in Europe, claimed responsibility for the attacks.' 8 "We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid," he declared, "exactly two and a half years after the attacks in New York and Washington. It is a response to your cooperation with the criminal Bush and his allies.... You love life and we love death."19 The tape sent shockwaves through Spain and convinced most Spaniards that Islamic fundamentalists and not ETA, as the government had repeatedly claimed, were behind the attacks.
The general elections of Sunday, March 14, took place in an extremely tense atmosphere. A quiet campaign that was expected to end with a comfortable victory for Aznar's ruling Popular Party had become white-hot after the attacks and the arrests in Lavapies. Thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Madrid, blaming the attacks on the Aznar government's support of the US-led war in Iraq. Graffiti saying "Aznar killer" covered the wall of the El Pozo train station, where two of the bombs had exploded. When Mariano Rajoy, the Popular Party's candidate for prime minister, went to vote at his Madrid polling station, other Spaniards attacked him with screams of "Liar!" and "Get our troops out of Iraq !1120 A record 77.2 percent of eligible Spaniards voted'21 giving an unexpected victory to the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol, or PSOE), whose main electoral goal just one week earlier had been to keep the same number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Madrid bombings made it clear that Islamic terrorists are not only bloodthirsty criminals willing to kill innocent civilians but also savvy interpreters of Western politics. Choosing to strike right before the elections, the terrorists correctly predicted that Spanish voters would blame the unprecedented carnage on their government's support of the US-led war in Iraq. The Aznar government's insistence on blaming ETA without even looking at the evidence only played into the hands of the bombers, as many Spaniards perceived this behavior as an attempted cover-up. The terrorists succeeded in persuading many that Spain was attacked solely because of its support of the war. Polls showed that a great number of voters believed that the new government's pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq would leave Spain untouched by Islamic militants in the future. One Spanish citizen who originally supported the Popular Party but voted for the Socialists spoke for many when he told an interviewer that he changed his mind because of the Madrid bombings: "Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain."22
While the attacks were clearly timed to influence the outcome of the Spanish elections, there are several indications that Spain had been a target of Islamic terrorism well before its involvement in the Iraqi war. Islamic militants have been active in Spain since the mid-1980s. Al Qaeda's cell in Madrid was one of its most active in Europe, and some of the cell's key members have been charged with direct involvement in the planning of 9/11.23 Jamal Zougam, one of the Moroccans arrested two days after the March 11 attacks, was closely linked to Abu Dahdah, the leader of the Madrid cell.' While the cell never carried out an attack on Spanish soil, it always considered Spain an infidel country suitable for a strike.
Many Islamists call Spain by its ancient Arabic name, Al Andalus, recalling the more than seven centuries of Muslim domination in the Iberian peninsula. Though that period, which ended with the 1492 expul sion of all Muslims from Spain, is ancient history for most Spaniards, the Muslim conquest still evokes inspiring memories of glory for Islamic fundamentalists. Radical preachers such as Abu Qatada and Mohammed Fazazi, the Madrid cell's two main spiritual leaders, often spoke of the day when Al Andalus would return to Muslim rule. And even Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, referred to the expulsion of the Arabs from the Iberian peninsula more than five centuries ago as "the tragedy of Al Andalus."25 Spain has a high symbolic value for Islamic fundamentalists as a place where Muslims have been humiliated and that has to be recaptured by the new Muslim armies. Indeed, as will be seen later, the group that carried out the train bombings called itself "the brigade situated in Al Andalus."26
It is the distance that Spain has come from Al Andulus that also explains why it was struck. The country is now a secular democracy with strong Christian roots that supports the modernization and democratization of its southern Muslim neighbors, such as Morocco and Algeria. Historical and geopolitical grievances give Islamic fundamentalists reason to hate Spain; its support for the war in Iraq was a minor factor. Indeed, Spanish investigators believe that the group that carried out the Madrid bombings had been studying the Spanish railway system for a possible attack for almost three years,27 beginning long before a US war with Iraq even seemed likely. But the war determined its timing, which was masterfully chosen to play on the emotions of the Spanish people.
In the online document "Jihadi Iraq, Hopes and Dangers," radicals had predicted that the Spanish government "could not tolerate more than two, maximum three blows." They were too conservative: one blow was enough in a country where 69 percent of the population opposed a war with Iraq even if it had the support of the United Nations 28 The voters punished the Popular Party and acclaimed the Socialists, who had strongly opposed the war since the beginning. A few days after he was sworn in, Zapatero, whom the London Times dubbed "the accidental pre- mier,"29 kept his promise to the electorate and began withdrawing the thirteen hundred Spanish troops from Iraq. By mid-May 2004, the last of them returned home. Al Qaeda had achieved its goal: it had become a key player in the political life of a Western democracy, influencing the outcome of an election. Significantly, when Jamal Zougam-later recognized by several eyewitnesses as one of the men who had placed the backpacks filled with explosives on the trains-entered the court after five days incommunicado, his first words were "Who won the elections?""
THE PERPETRATORS
As soon as they realized that the mobile phones that had been used for the bombings had been sold to Jamal Zougam, Spanish authorities knew that Islamic fundamentalists were behind the attacks. The thirty-one-year-old Moroccan immigrant from Tangier, who had moved to Spain in 1983 with his mother, was well known t
o them for his involvement with radicals in Spain and in at least two other countries .31 Nevertheless, he had never been charged with a crime and was not under surveillance.
In 2001 Spanish authorities had received an official request to investigate Zougam from their Moroccan counterparts, who believed that Zougam was involved with a network of veterans of Afghanistan operating in Morocco.32 At the same time, French authorities were also interested in him, as they had information that he had met in a Madrid mosque with David Courtailler, the French convert convicted for his terrorist activities in May 2004. The French antiterrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere traveled to Spain and interviewed Zougam in June 2001.33 Acting on the information provided by Paris, Spanish police searched Zougam's apartment in August 2001 and found several tapes of the fighting in Chechnya and speeches of Mullah Krekar.34 Phone numbers of known radicals operating in Madrid were also discovered.
Spanish investigators also knew Zougam as a marginal figure in the network of Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the leader of an important al Qaeda cell operating in Madrid that had helped provide logistical support for the network. Yarkas had recruited dozens of Muslims residing in Spain for al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan, where his associate and former Madrid resident Chej Saleh was working as a trainer.35 While raising thousands of dollars for the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Yarkas maintained close relationships with al Qaeda militants on four continents, traveling constantly to London to meet with Abu Qatada and to Oslo to meet Mullah Krekar, whom Zougam also allegedly met.36 In addition, Yarkas and members of his cell are accused of having organized the July 2001 meeting in Spain between Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh at which the two former Hamburg residents finalized the plans for the attacks of 9/11.
Al Qaeda in Europe Page 31
