Madrid bombers planned more terror attacks

10 March 2005

MADRID-Islamic extremists behind the train bombings in Madrid a year ago were planning other attacks before they blew themselves up as police raided their apartment, an investigating judge said.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported a video found in the rubble warned of “new attacks and attacks against various targets: schools, a Jewish centre in Avila”, said magistrate Olga Sanchez, who is heading up the probe into the train blasts.

“The suicide, happily, put an end to those plans,” she said.

The seven suspects killed themselves and one police officer on 3 April last year as police raided the apartment building.

They set off bombs similar to the ones used to kill 191 people on four crowded commuter trains in the attacks of March 11 – one of Europe’s worst terror attacks.

Sanchez said the group, who included the suspected ringleaders of the cell behind the train bombings, “had no intention of committing suicide” but were instead bent on launching more attacks from 4 April, 2004.

That was the deadline they had fixed for Spain to meet their demand for the withdrawal of its troops from the US-led military deployment in Iraq.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who took over as prime minister in elections on 14 March, three days after the train attacks, announced after his victory he was pulling those soldiers out as per an electoral promise.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

Subject: Spanish news