José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said yesterday that the outgoing Government of José María Aznar sought to deceive the public about who carried out the bombings in an attempt to influence the outcome of the general election that took place three days later.

Testifying to a parliamentary commission, Señor Zapatero stopped just short of accusing the conservative People’s Party of Señor Aznar of lying about the explosions, which killed 191 people.

Señor Zapatero, who was heckled by opposition MPs as he gave evidence, also denied that his Socialist party instigated the anti-government rallies on the eve of the election to reap political benefit from the bombings.

In the aftermath of his unexpected election victory, the Prime Minister has waged a bitter war of words with Señor Aznar, whose Government initially claimed that Basque terrorists were responsible for the train bombs.

Socialists claim that Señor Aznar deliberately withheld from the public evidence of an Islamic link, fearing a backlash against his support for the American-led war in Iraq. Those claims have been denied by Señor Aznar.

Yesterday Señor Zapatero said that it had been impossible to establish the truth because computer records had been destroyed.

Giving evidence under oath he said: “In the Prime Minister’s office we did not have a single document or any data on computer because the whole Cabinet of the previous Government carried out a massive erasure.

“That means that we have nothing about what happened, information that might have been received, meetings or decisions that were taken from March 11 until March 14.”

Señor Zapatero confirmed a report in El País, the left- of-centre daily newspaper, that a wide range of policy documents covering the eight years of Señor Aznar’s administration was missing.

The newspaper said that Señor Aznar’s Government had paid a private company €12,000 (£8,000) to destroy the documents.

Yesterday, when asked about his predecessor’s claims that Eta was responsible for the train bombings, Señor Zapatero replied: “It was all deceit. It was massive deceit.

“The control, preparation and responsibility for the March 11 attacks is exclusively linked to international terrorism of the Islamic radical type,” the Prime Minister, who is the first head of government to appear before a parliamentary investigatory panel in Spain, said. “It is the factual truth, not an opinion.”

Señor Zapatero said that the previous Government had no objective reason to blame the attacks on Eta as of the afternoon of the bombings, but kept doing so right up to midnight before the March 14 vote.

His insistence follows months of newspaper stories alleging an Eta link to the March attacks, in spite of a lack of concrete evidence.

Señor Zapatero said that the planning and execution of the attacks was carried out by the same people who planned the 9/11 strikes in the United States and explosions at a Bali nightclub in October 2002, along with bombings in Casablanca, Morocco, in May last year, and in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2003.

All those attacks have been blamed on groups linked to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

Señor Zapatero said that the interrogation of Islamist suspects and Eta prisoners had shown that there was no link between them in planning or carrying out the attacks. He rejected Señor Aznar’s claim that the Madrid blasts had been timed to influence the Spanish election but said that the involvement in Iraq had increased the risk of attacks.

He said that he had pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq after taking office because public opinion was against their presence, because the war was illegal and did not respect the UN procedures, and was counter-productive in the campaign against terrorism.

His testimony came amid continuing fears over security in Madrid. More than 70,000 football fans were evacuated on Sunday night from the city’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium after a telephone bomb threat in the name of Eta. No device was found.

Señor Zapatero said that Spaniards displayed a “gallery of heroism” in their response to the bombings, tending victims and turning out in their millions to protest a day after the bombings.

“This example that we Spaniards provided remains in everyone’s memory. Nobody can erase it, or months later distort history offending us by deceit or insinuation,” Señor Zapatero told the commission.

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