Spanish officials investigating the Madrid terror attacks provided little new information yesterday about who might have carried out the bombings, and gave conflicting interpretations of the evidence that emerged. The Spanish interior minister, Ãngel Acebes, said the Basque separatist group ETA remained the governmentâs prime suspect in the bombings, in which at least 199 people have died. Some Spanish antiterrorism officials said, however, that they questioned the governmentâs seeming insistence on implicating the Basque group despite information that suggested the possible involvement of Islamic militants.
The difference of views among Spanish officials crystallized over an unexploded bomb that investigators recovered from one of the four trains blown up on Thursday morning as they carried commuters into Madrid from the working-class suburb of Alcalá de Henares. Mr. Acebes said the bomb, hidden in a gym bag, was made of a Spanish-made blasting explosive known as Goma 2-E that ETA has often used in the past. The bombers also used shrapnel to increase the impact of the bomb and a cellphone as a trigger, he said. Privately, however, another Spanish antiterrorism official said Goma 2, a gelatinous, nitroglycerin-based explosive that is typically used in mining, has been linked to ETA only rarely since the Spanish authorities began to tightly guard supplies of it in the 1980âs. After those controls were imposed, ETA began to depend mainly on explosives stolen abroad, particularly in France and Germany, including a huge cache of a dynamite-like explosive known as titadine.
Other Spanish officials said they were more intrigued by the link between the unexploded bomb and a stolen van that was found Thursday near the Alcalá station where three of the four trains originated, in which seven detonators were discovered. The detonator on the unexploded bomb, as Mr. Acebes disclosed yesterday, was the same as those found in the van. The van also contained some documents in Arabic and an audiotape of readings from the Koran that one official said referred to the education of children. Two Spanish antiterrorism officials said they expected it would take another day or two to begin to draw firmer conclusions from the forensic analysis of samples taken from the bomb sites. With Spanish national elections scheduled for Sunday, one official said he was suspicious of the governmentâs sudden restraint in assessing the evidence gathered so far in the Madrid bombings. "I think they may be holding back information so that it doesnât influence the vote," the official said.
| I suspect that's the reason, too. They don't know which direction the public will sway... |
American counterterrorism officials were careful not to speculate about who might be responsible for the Madrid attacks, deferring to the Spanish government. One American official cautioned specifically against "leaning too far in the direction of Islamic extremist involvement," despite the apparent link between the stolen van and the recovered bomb. "It is the kind of thing that ETA certainly would have the capability to carry out," the official said.
American officials also noted that there had been no increase in the "chatter" in monitored terrorist communications that they often pick up before attacks by Al Qaeda. But officials who were more skeptical of ETAâs involvement said none of that necessarily led to the conclusion that the group would or could carry out attacks on such a scale. Before Thursday, the most victims killed in an ETA attack had been 21, in a Barcelona supermarket bombing in 1987. But public outrage at that indiscriminate attack plunged the group into a crisis that eventually led to the ascendancy of more moderate leaders. The moderate leaders, however, have since "lost control of their commandos," one Spanish official said.
| The thing in favor of it being that ETA is that with the Spanish government's recent crackdowns on it, they're up against the wall. Whether this is their attack or not, they're going to be eradicated, so they have nothing to lose. Being terrs, the fact that they've got nothing to gain doesn't really make any difference. |
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