THE star witness to the parliamentary committee inquiry into the March 11 Madrid train bombings that killed nearly 200 people has challenged the official version of events immediately after the blasts.
On the first day of the public hearings, the doorman of an apartment block in Alcalá de Henares, from where the ill-fated trains set out, said yesterday that police had told him on the day of the attacks that the Basque terrorist group Eta was not responsible and showed him photographs of Arab suspects.
Immediately after the attacks the Government insisted that Eta separatists were responsible, even as mounting evidence pointed to al-Qaeda. Those claims triggered a public backlash against the conservative Popular Party (PP) in the general election that took place three days later, and handed victory to the opposition Socialist Party.
The Socialists maintain that the retiring Prime Minister, José María Aznar, sought to mislead voters by blaming Eta for the bombings, fearing a backlash over his Government’s support for the US-led war in Iraq if al-Qaeda were in fact to blame.
Yesterday Luis Garrudo Fernández, the doorman, said he had told police he saw three “foreign-looking” men at 7am on March 11 put on balaclavas, “even though it was not cold”, after leaving a white van and head for the railway station at Alcalá de Henares, 19 miles northeast of Madrid.
In the next two hours bombs on four packed commuter trains that had stopped at that station exploded, killing 191 and injuring 1,700.
The doorman told the inquiry that police, alerted by him, inspected the van in the morning. They told him that there were detonators and a cassette inside, but he could not remember if they told him the cassette had a label in Arabic. The cassette contained exhortations from the Koran.
His statement contradicts a police report that the contents of the van were not discovered until that afternoon.
While being driven by police to make a statement, he said that he had heard on the radio that Arnaldo Otegi, the spokesman for Eta’s political party, had denied Eta’s involvement. “A policeman then told me that he did not believe that it was Eta,” he told the commission of 16 deputies. He said that at 7pm that evening he was asked to look at photographs of Arab suspects, some with Palestinian scarves.
The evidence of the doorman appears to substantiate claims that the Popular Party, probably at the instigation of Señor Aznar, may have deliberately ignored intelligence reports, in the run-up to the general election, that al-Qaeda was the main suspect.
In response to that testimony, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the Socialist government spokesman, said: “While the police did their work investigating Islamic terrorism, and did it well, the Government had a different line. On March 11 the police were already showing photos of possible Islamic terrorists to witnesses and the then Government was doing something else.”
Eduardo Zaplana, spokesman for the Popular Party, earlier accused the Socialists of “trying to hide the truth”.
Señor Aznar was generally regarded as leading a successful crackdown against Eta, while the Socialist Party still suffers the stigma of its previous government’s botched dirty war against the terrorists.
The parliamentary commission to investigate 11-M, as it is known in Spain, is tasked with establishing whether the security services could have prevented the attacks. It has already been established that several of the main suspects now detained were either known al-Qaeda activists in Spain or petty criminals acting as police informers.
But, with the police investigation still under way and many documents classified as secret or sub judice, the main thrust of the commission’s inquiry is political. The Socialists want to prove that the Popular Party tried to manipulate the media and public opinion with a huge propaganda exercise between 11-M and the election. To that effect two foreign journalists, including the chairman of the main foreign correspondents’ association, have been called as witnesses. They received personal telephone calls from the Prime Minister’s office assuring them that Eta was responsible.
The conservatives want to prove that the Socialists obtained inside information that al-Qaeda was responsible and then organised well-publicised, but illegal, demonstrations against the Popular Party, accusing it of a cover-up, on the day before the election.
Yesterday the inquiry also heard Carmen Baladía, director of the Institute of Forensic Anatomy, say there were no suicide bombers on the trains.
Eduardo Blanco, the police chief in Alcalá de Henares, denied police had searched the van in the morning or found anything suspicious. The bomb squad had inspected it at midday. He said he was not told until that evening that detonators and an Arab cassette had been found in the vehicle.
“We were working on the hypothesis that it was Eta,” he told the commission after his escort of former PP government officials was expelled from the chamber.
The attack and the aftermath
- March 11 Madrid train bombings kill 191 and injure 1,700
- March 12 Spain blames Eta, the Basque separatist group; a militant Muslim group claims responsibility
- March 13 José María Aznar, outgoing conservative Spanish Prime Minister, vows to hunt down bombers but debate continues over who is responsible
- March 14 Spanish Interior Minister announces the arrest of five people, three Moroccans and two Indians. The Socialist Party wins the Spanish general election
