Spooks find no link between ETA and Madrid bombers

28 September 2006

MADRID — Security services have found no evidence of any links between the Basque terrorist group ETA and the Madrid train bombings.

In a categorical denial of claims of a government cover-up, interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said there had been no attempts to falsify police reports to conceal ETA ties to the train bombings which have been attributed to Islamic radicals.

The Spanish daily El Pais reported on Thursday Rubalcaba answered a parliamentary question from the conservative  Popular Party on the subject.

The PP deputy, Jaime Ignacio del Burgo, had said that, if it is eventually determined that the Interior Ministry falsified any such documents, it will have to accept “resulting political responsibility”.

The minister replied police and the intelligence services deny the existence of any such reports and contend that, in all their lines of investigation, there is no objective evidence linking ETA to the 11 March attacks.

That view, Perez Rubalcaba said, is shared by every party in parliament except the PP, as well as by the judges and prosecutors in charge of the investigation and Europe’s spy agencies.

Only the Spanish conservatives persist with the “lie” that ETA had something to do with the bloodbath in Madrid, the minister said.

He also referred to the recent declassification of parts of a U.S. intelligence document stating that the Washington-led war in Iraq led to an expansion of the Islamic terrorist movement.

He also cited as examples the 2004 attacks in Madrid and the London bombings of July 2005.

“I know that it doesn’t matter to you because you’re not looking for the truth. You’re trying to justify your lies between the 11th and 14th of March 2004,” he said.

The attacks, which took place under the PP government of Jose Maria Aznar and came just days before Spaniards went to the polls to elect a new government, were seen as playing a major role in current Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s shock victory over PP candidate Mariano Rajoy.

Socialist lawmakers who served on the parliamentary panel created to probe the causes and consequences of the attacks pointed to “manipulation” of the media by the Aznar administration during the period between the massacre.

Aznar’s government had provided Spanish troops for the U.S. occupation of Iraq and was closely aligned with the Bush administration despite popular opposition to the war.

According to one line of reasoning, Aznar’s administration feared that, if radical Islamic authorship of the train attacks became known, people would see the assault as a response to Madrid’s support for Washington and would chastise the PP at the polls.

The PP’s parliamentary spokesman, Eduardo Zaplana, said his party will continue demanding that the full truth about the 11 March bombings be uncovered and denounced a conspiracy to prevent full disclosure of the facts surrounding the preparation and perpetration of the attacks.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

Subject: Spanish news