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Train bombers targeted community center, cemetary

WAR ON TERROR: The suspects believed responsible for the bombings in Madrid last month chose more targets because of Spain's involvement in Afghanistan

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , MADRID, SPAIN
Thursday, Apr 15, 2004,Page 6

Terrorists believed responsible for the Madrid train bombings last month also considered attacks on a Jewish community center and cemetery outside Madrid, a senior Spanish investigator said on Tuesday.

A map showing the two sites was found in the ruins of an apartment destroyed 10 days ago when at least six of the suspected bombers blew themselves up to avoid capture by the police, the official added.

The police also found evidence that the men were investigating the possibility of hitting at least one other target that would inflict major casualties.

"We are sure they were looking at an attack of the Jewish targets," the official said. "They apparently had other alternatives as well, although we are less sure of them."

The bombers were plotting new attacks because, it appears from evidence found in the apartment, they were unhappy with suggestions by the newly elected Socialist government that it would double Spain's contingent of soldiers in Afghanistan to 250 troops.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who will be sworn in soon as prime minister, has pledged repeatedly since his election victory that he will remove Spanish troops from Iraq unless they are placed under a UN mandate by June 30. But he told US Secretary of State Colin Powell at a meeting on March 24, for example, that Spain was prepared to play a bigger role in Afghanistan, and other leading Socialists have said that the plan was to double Spain's troop strength.

The full text of a painstakingly reconstructed video found in the ruins of the apartment and released by the police Tuesday offered the terrorists' first criticism of the Socialists, who defeated Spain's center-right government in the election three days after the March 11 bombings.

"After discovering that the situation has not changed, and that your new government announced it would start its mandate with yet more fighting against Muslims and the deployment of more crusader troops to Afghanistan, the Death Squadrons and Ansar al-Qaeda have decided to continue on the path of holy war and resistance," the speaker on the video said.

The speaker added that unless all Spanish troops were withdrawn from Muslim lands within a week, the holy war would continue.

One senior official said investigators believed that the speaker, who was masked and wearing explosives strapped around his waist and who was flanked by two other masked men, was Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the Tunisian thought to have been at the center of the train bombings. He was later killed in the suicide explosion in the apartment.

The suspected plan to attack Jewish targets near the town of Hoyo de Manzanares north of Madrid was first reported in the daily newspaper El Mundo on Tuesday.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, who declined to be identified by name, insisted that there was no evidence to confirm "the intention of targeting any Jewish target around Madrid."

However, Fernando Esteban, the mayor of Hoyo de Manzanares, said that Spanish authorities had alerted him last Thursday that the Jewish center had been a target and that "security measures had to be taken."

"They told us documents were found in the Leganes apartment in which the center appeared as a target," he said in a telephone interview.

The mayor said that he was told that only the Jewish center, which is next to one of Spain's few Jewish cemeteries, was marked on the map, and that the police combed the area around both sites for explosives. None were found.

Jacobo Israel, president of Madrid's small Jewish community, said this would be the first time that a Jewish site in Spain had been threatened by Islamic extremists, but that the news did not come as a surprise.

"We always thought we were a target and I think this just confirms the reality," he said in a telephone interview.

Investigators have drawn no concrete link between the Madrid train bombings and attacks against five targets last May in Casablanca, Morocco, in which 47 people, including 12 suicide bombers, were killed. However, one of the places attacked was a Jewish cemetery; another was a Jewish community center; a third was the Casa de Espana, a Spanish-owned restaurant and social club.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/04/15/2003136733