| French authorities are investigating whether the Madrid train bombers hacked into the telephone exchange of a bank near Paris as they were planning their attack, say judicial sources. Prosecutors this month began a probe into a flurry of calls to Spain and Morocco from a bank in the Val-de-Marne area. The calls increased significantly in the days before the attack and stopped a few hours before the bombs ripped through a series of commuter trains on March 11, killing 191 people, according to the daily newspaper Le Parisien. Police have established that the calls were made by "phreaking" -- a practice similar to hacking that bypasses the charging system. The paper said Rabei Osman Ahmed es-Sayed, alias Mohamed the Egyptian, a suspect in the attacks who was arrested in Milan in June, spent several months in Val-de-Marne last year. The judicial sources said France's DST domestic intelligence service, which has already been ordered to investigate French connections to the attacks, was leading the latest inquiry. |