Posted on 03/11/2004 9:54:07 PM PST by empirekin768
Madrid attacks unlikely to be work of ETA: expert The World Today - Friday, 12 March , 2004 12:22:33 Reporter: Ben Knight
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Well while the Spanish authorities might be making an early call on who's responsible, others are more cautious.
One Australian expert on terrorism says the Madrid atrocity appears more likely to be the work of al-Qaeda, or a group linked to al-Qaeda, rather than the Basque group, ETA.
Dr David Wright-Neville is the Director for the Global Terrorism Project at Monash University.
And he's speaking here to our reporter Ben Knight in Melbourne.
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: I'm a little bit suspicious of the speed with which the Spanish authorities pointed the finger at ETA, and if we compare ETA's performance to that of other groups around the world, or new terrorist groups in particular, which are mass casualty, sudden attacks without any warning, it seems to me that this is more likely to be the work of those sorts of latter people.
BEN KNIGHT: Well there are of course in the small amount of information that we have at the moment, several links to al-Qaeda, and that is, the discovery of a van with detonators and Arabic verses. Of course there's the group which is claiming responsibility for it in an English newspaper, although that's being treated with some scepticism. There is of course the link between Spain and the war on terror.
So why would it not be al-Qaeda in your view?
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: Well I think we have to be careful about over-exaggerating the extent to which al-Qaeda is a cohesive organisation.
It's a very loose network of groups around the world, and even though the al-Qaeda hierarchy are known to have leant support to some of these groups, they themselves, I think, are very much in a different phase at the moment.
They're trying to reconsolidate themselves after the loss of their bases in Afghanistan, they're very much concerned with putting up firewalls to try and protect themselves from the counter-terrorist efforts of the United States and its partners in the war on terror and so on.
If I was forced to hazard a guess at the moment, I would suggest that it might be a group linked to this network – the al-Qaeda network – they might have received some logistic assistance, perhaps some explosives assistance from the al-Qaeda experts who are known to lend out their skills in this area.
But again, without more evidence it's really impossible to say absolutely who might have been responsible for the tragedy.
BEN KNIGHT: How long would it take to coordinate and plan an attack like this?
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: It's certainly a highly sophisticated attack; it's clearly involved quite a deal of pre-attack planning and coordination.
It could take anything from two years up to a couple of months. But it's certainly not a random attack.
Certainly a lot of thought has gone into it, and that again inclines me to believe that it's probably less likely to be ETA and more likely to be the work of a larger network.
BEN KNIGHT: Is it easier to mount such an attack in a country like Spain than it is in Australia?
DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: I think that's a very important question, and I think it's a good question because I think it's true.
I think the proximity of Spain to North Africa where we know that there are a lot of still very well coordinated terrorist cells operating, the ease of movement between Spain and North Africa or between Western Europe and North Africa, but also the higher profile that Western Europe has in the world press means that not only is it easier for terrorists to launch attacks in that part of the world, but in terms of the publicity and the impact that it generates, it is greater than an attack that would occur in Australia.
Having said that, I don't think we can be complacent.
I think that like Spain and like Italy, like France and like Britain, we've been mentioned by senior al-Qaeda people as a part of… as a member of this sort of enemy coalition that is opposed to them and their version of Islam more generally. And so I think that we ought to be treating those sorts of threats more seriously, particularly in wake of what happened overnight in Madrid.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Dr David Wright-Neville, who is the Director of the Global Terrorism Project at Monash University.
He was speaking in Melbourne to Ben Knight.
This Spanish press report: Los terroristas pretendían volar la estación de Atocha states that the terrorrists had attempted to plan the detonation of the bombs so that the trains would have been inside Atocha Station. Allegedly, the intention was to have the shock waves collapse the building and maximize casualties.
Remember when it was considered Politically Incorrect for Spain to have expelled all the Muslims from Spain in the 16th Century?
Yes. In Spanish, "bomba" is a synonym for "pump" and "bomb".
A "fireman" is a "bombero", literally a "pump-man" which I presume originated back in the old days when firemen had those old manually operated contraptions.
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