Judge charges 29 over Madrid train terror attacks

[SonOfBeastSucks]

Judge charges 29 over Madrid train terror attacks

April 11, 2006

 

MADRID -- A Spanish judge on Tuesday charged 29 mostly Moroccan suspects with involvement in the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people in Spain's worst terror attack.

 

In a charge sheet running to 1,460 pages, Judge Juan del Olmo accused five Moroccans - Jamal Zougam, Abdel Majid Bouchar, Youssef Belhadj, Rabei Ousman Sayed Ahmed and Hassan Al Haski - of 191 murders and 1,755 attempted murders.

 

A Spanish former miner, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, said to have organized the transport of the explosives from a disused former mine in northern Spain to Madrid, was also accused of 192 murders. As well as the train murders he will have to answer for the death of Francisco Javier Torronteras, a policeman who died when seven key suspects committed suicide three weeks after the blasts during a police raid on an apartment in the Madrid suburb of Leganes.

 

The five Moroccans, cited to appear in court to answer charges on May 16, 17 and 18, as well as Trashorras, are set to face prosecution demands for jail terms running into the thousands of years, though under Spanish law they could only serve a maximum of 40 years behind bars. They and 23 others, charged as accomplices, will go forward to one of Europe's biggest ever terrorist trials, set to last over a year.

 

The attacks were the worst in Europe since 270 people were killed when a Pan Am jet was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988.

 

Zougam has been in jail in Spain since being hauled in within days of the bombings while Bouchar was extradited from Serbia-Montenegro to Madrid last September. The 29 charged, out of a total of 116 suspects, include nine Spaniards accused of involvement in the transport of the explosives used in the near-simultaneous bombings of four commuter trains.

 

Del Olmo, head of Spain's highest criminal court, has spent the intervening 25 months sifting huge quantities of information pertaining to the blasts, which shattered Spain three days before a general election that saw the conservative Popular Party (PP) unseated.

 

Islamic radicals sympathetic to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying that they were payback for then prime minister Jose Maria Aznar sending troops to Iraq to back the US-led intervention. Aznar and his party initially blamed armed Basque separatist group ETA for the carnage, despite the swift emergence of evidence fingering Islamic radicals.

 

Some 11 million Spaniards took to the streets the day after the bombings and some voters, feeling that the PP had misled them by insisting ETA had perpetrated the attacks, switched to the Socialist Party. Within weeks of becoming prime minister, Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq, thereby fulfilling a pre-election promise.

 

Prosecutor Olga Sanchez on Monday insisted that the investigation had shown that "there is no link between ETA and Islamic terrorism".

 

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060411-101458-3679r