A MAN whose 13-year-old stepdaughter was killed in the Madrid train bombings has been jailed on suspicion of helping the mastermind of the atrocity to flee the country.

Abdeneri Essebar spent March 11 last year — the day that bombs exploded on four commuter trains during the morning rush hour — with his wife, Jamila, searching for her daughter, Sanae ben Salah, among Madrid’s hospitals.

But more than a year after 191 people were murdered and 1,900 injured, he has been arrested and jailed on a preliminary charge of membership of a terrorist organisation and accused of helping at least one of the bombing team to flee Spain.

The accused man’s step- daughter was on her way to school when she died in one of the trains, which departed for Madrid from Alcalá de Henares. Her mother had married Señor Essebar in 2002 shortly after meeting him in the pair met in Tangiers, Morocco.

Police sources told a Spanish newspaper that Señor Essebar helped Mohammed Afalah, one of the alleged masterminds of the Madrid massacre, to escape from Spain shortly after the attacks.

Señor Essebar was also an associate of another prime suspect, Larbi ben Sellam, who had for years been encouraging a jihad on Spain, an “apostate nation” because of its overthrow of the ruling Muslims 700 years ago.

El Mundo, the newspaper that broke the story yesterday, said that Señor Essebar’s was “a journey so cruel to the darkest depths of human evil that it is almost impossible to assimilate”.

But Señor Essebar’s wife has stood by him since his arrest during a raid on their house a month ago. She refuses to believe that her husband, who was working in a transport company in Morocco when they met, was involved with the extremists. “It’s impossible, how would he do something which cost the life of one of his family?” she told the newspaper. “He wasn’t her father but he loved her. He treated her like a daughter. It would amaze me that my husband did something against her like that.”

Jamila, an observant Muslim, denied that her husband was an extremist.

“It was me who tried to get him to follow the religion,” she said, adding that he drank alcohol, which is forbidden by the Islamic faith. “If I had the slightest doubt about him do you think that I would be visiting him in prison?”

Afalah, who made his way to Iraq from Spain via Belgium and Syria after the Madrid massacre, is believed to have carried out a suicide attack against United States troops two months ago.

• Inmates at a Spanish prison yesterday beat up a suspected al-Qaeda cell leader being held on charges that he helped plot the September 11 attacks, an official said. Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard, was attacked at a jail in the eastern city of Castellón. He was sent to hospital.

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