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Carnage leads conflicting clues to Madrid booms
A somewhat different perspective on the subject than the other story.The flood of conflicting evidence and clues that emerged from the carnage of the Madrid bombings yesterday pointed in two very different directions, leaving counterterrorism officials in a country painfully familiar with terrorist violence struggling to identify a culprit. Just hours after the bombings, the Spanish authorities blamed the Basque separatist group known as ETA. Hours later, the same officials announced the discovery of new evidence they said left open the possibility that Islamic militants had been involved. "Could it have been Islamic fundamentalists?" one senior Spanish antiterrorism official asked last night. "It could have been. Spain is clearly a target of Al Qaeda; Osama bin Laden has said so himself." The scale of the violence, the indiscriminate nature of the killing and the near-simultaneity of the 10 bombings yesterday were all reminiscent of Al Qaeda. In addition, the Spanish interior minister said the police had found detonators and an audio tape of Koranic verses inside a stolen van that was parked near the station where three of the four bombed trains originated. Unless the Basques have decided to switch religions on us, a van loaded with detonators and Arabic audiotapes tends to point things in the Islamist direction ... In a sign of concern that the violence might not be limited to Spain, France raised its national terrorism alert from the lowest level. A senior French security official said in the days before the Madrid bombings that they had indications of possible terrorist attacks on railways in France and other European nations. That would be the ransom demand that we heard about a little while ago. Yet in the chaotic aftermath of the bombings, antiterrorism officials cautioned that other evidence seemed to implicate ETA. One Spanish official who spoke on the condition he not be named said the dynamite-like explosive used in the attacks, Titadine, had been used before by ETA, which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom. It is also widely available commercially, per the WaPo article. Most recently the police found the same explosive in a vehicle they intercepted last month as it was driven to Madrid by ETA militants. The police also found bomb-laden backpacks like those used in yesterdayâs attacks when they foiled a bombing at a Madrid train station on Christmas Eve, an event they linked to ETA. Yesterdayâs bombings also came after months of intelligence reporting that ETA was planning a major attack, several Spanish officials said. The timing of the violence â with national elections scheduled for Sunday â seemed to suggest ETAâs hand as well, they said. Or Binnyâs jackboots wanting to pay back Aznar and the Popular Party for supporting the war in Iraq while he was still in office. The evidence can be interpretted either way, though I doubt the van w/ the detonator and the tapes can ... But even as the interior minister, Ãngel Acebes, was blaming ETA directly for the carnage, another senior Spanish counterterrorism official questioned privately whether the Basque group would wantonly kill so many innocents, most of whom were the sort of working-class people to whom ETAâs Marxist-oriented leaders have traditionally tried to appeal. "Iâm not so certain," said the official, who has investigated Basque terrorism for more than a decade. "The problem is that ETA has never taken a step of this magnitude before. This would be off the charts for them." ETA has long demanded an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southern France. The group has been under increasing pressure from both governments in recent years, and officials said they believed its capacity for violent action appeared to have declined. The Spanish authorities reported arresting 125 ETA members and accomplices last year. The French arrested 46 others, including some senior leaders. "Neither ETA nor Grapo maintains the degree of operational capability it once enjoyed," the American State Department reported this year, referring also to a smaller radical organization called the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Group. "The overall level of terrorist activity is considerably less than in the past, and the trend appears to be downward." Some in Spain fear that yesterdayâs bombings could be an indication that the crackdown could be driving radical young Basques into the ETA underground. "If this was ETA, it is the crazies, the cubs, who have grown more and more radical," a senior Spanish antiterrorism official said. "The more political cadres are losing influence, and these ones are more difficult to reason with." The problem is, the krazed kiddies arenât going to be the ones with the intelligence, patience, or sophistication to orchestrate what happened in Madrid, at least IMO. So that means either some of the old guard are still at large and have expanded their horizons or that itâs somebody else. What the Basques could possibly hope to accomplish by perpetrating this atrocity is anyoneâs guess, it sure ainât going to get them their own country anytime soon. In Washington, a counterterrorism official cautioned against assigning blame, saying terrorism experts would carefully review the evidence before ruling out involvement by ETA. He said American officials were still discussing whether to send experts to assist the Spanish governmentâs investigation. Before yesterday, Al Qaeda had not carried out any known attacks in Spain. But prosecutors say the group has maintained cells in Spain since at least the early 1990âs, insinuating themselves among the countryâs growing Arab immigrant population. The Spanish police and intelligence agencies, strengthened in part by their long struggle against Basque separatists, began watching such groups well before most of their European counterparts. By the mid-1990âs, they were monitoring a network of Syrian immigrants, many of them affiliated with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood whose members have since been accused of logistical and other support to the Sept. 11 hijackers. In a nearly 700-page indictment issued last year, the Spanish investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón accused one of the Syrians, a successful businessman named Muhammad Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, of distributing $800,000 for the Qaeda network under the cover of a Spanish real-estate development company. Mr. Kalajeâs lawyer has denied the charges.
Thatâd be the al-Tawhid thug who was running Zarqawiâs ops out of Germany. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-03-12 |
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