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Fingerprint Led to U.S. Madrid Bomb Suspect
An American lawyer arrested in the United States was being held as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings after investigators found a fingerprint on a bag linked to the bombers, Spanish police sources said on Friday. Investigators found the bag containing detonators in a van outside a station where the bombers were believed to have boarded trains before the March 11 attacks.
When no match for the single fingerprint was found in Spain, police distributed it abroad, including to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman said. Brandon Mayfield, a convert to Islam who married an Egyptian woman, would be the first American implicated in the case. U.S. officials have yet to confirm the arrest, which was reported by Mayfield's brother and Spanish officials after Newsweek magazine broke the story. Spanish police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI had found more evidence in the fingerprint than had the investigators in Spain. The FBI discovered 15 points of similarity between the fingerprint on the bag and Mayfield's corresponding finger, but police in Spain found only eight points of similarity, the Spanish police sources said. Several other unidentified fingerprints also were found on that bag, the sources said. There is no international standard for the number of points of identification required for a match between two fingerprints, according to CrimTrac, an Australian agency that assists police.
An FBI spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny the detention, saying only that two search warrants had been issued in connection with an unspecified investigation. Newsweek said the lawyer had done child custody work for one of six Oregon Muslims convicted last year of trying to travel to Afghanistan to help al Qaeda -- the network blamed for the Madrid bombings and the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. The magazine quoted sources as saying the lawyer had been under FBI surveillance for some time and was being held as a "material witness" in a grand jury investigation. That allowed the U.S. Justice Department to hold him in secret without formally filing charges. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. Mayfield, a former U.S. Army officer, was critical of the foreign policy of President Bush's administration, his brother said. Reached at his home in Halstead, Kansas, Kent Mayfield told Reuters on Thursday: "I can swear up and down my brother has no connection to terrorist attacks."
Posted by: Steve 2004-05-07 |
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