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| Europe |
| 3/11 indictments to be issued soon |
| 2006-04-10 |
| After more than two years of delays and rampant speculation about his findings, a Spanish judge is expected to issue indictments early this week in connection with the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded at least 1,000. The bombings, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of Western Europe since the downing of a Pan American Airlines flight over Scotland in 1988, have led to the arrests of about 120 people and the provisional jailing of 24. It is not clear how many will be indicted. Local news reports estimate that the number of indictments will be between 30 and 40. The judge handling the case, Juan del Olmo, has shunned publicity throughout the investigation, hardly speaking with the press and keeping much of his work from public view. Still, the broad outlines of his conclusions are evident in several of his provisional court filings, which attribute the attacks to Islamic radicals, most of them Moroccans and many with ties to Al Qaeda. According to the filings, the group appears to have come together in Spain, initially under the guidance of a Syrian named Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah, who was convicted by a Spanish court in September of conspiring to commit the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and of leading a cell of Al Qaeda in Spain. After Yarkas was arrested in 2001, leadership of the group eventually passed to a younger radical, a former Tunisian graduate student in economics named Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, who in early 2003 began calling for an attack on Spain in part because of its support of American policies toward Iraq, the documents say. Fakhet and his co-leader, Jamal Ahmidan, the man who investigators have called the operational head of the cell, blew themselves up along with five other members of the group when their apartment near Madrid was surrounded by the Spanish police about three weeks after the train bombings. Investigators working with del Olmo say that practically all of the principal members of the group are now dead or in custody, and that they have unraveled most of what the group did in the days leading up to the attacks, largely through information gathered from phone records. What they have not established, at least not publicly, is the existence of a link between the group and the top leadership of Al Qaeda. Many investigators say that the typically horizontal structure of Islamic terrorist networks suggests that the group probably conceived and carried out the train bombings without any order or message from Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants. Del Olmo has been publicly criticized by senior judges for the slow pace of his investigation, leading him to set his own deadline of April 10 for issuing the indictments. A court official said that the judge was likely to miss the deadline by a day, suggesting he would publish his findings on Tuesday rather than Monday. The trial is expected to begin in late summer or in early autumn. One person has been convicted so far, a minor identified by the initials G.M.V. who pleaded guilty in November 2004 to having helped provide the explosives used in the attacks. Del Olmo's investigation has been the subject of intense partisan maneuverings almost from the outset. Members of the center-right Popular Party, which was in power at the time of the attacks, continue to suggest that ETA, the militant Basque separatist group, was involved - a claim they made in the days immediately after the attacks. The governing Socialists call this reckless disregard for the facts, contending that the Popular Party is trying to fend off criticism that the attacks were a response from Muslim radicals to Spanish support for the American invasion of Iraq. While being careful not to directly blame the previous government for the attacks, saying that only terrorists are responsible for terrorism, the Socialists have argued that the policy of supporting the invasion of Iraq put Spain at greater risk of attack from Islamic militants. The police investigators have said repeatedly that there is no evidence indicating that ETA participated in the train bombings. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 "Local news reports estimate that the number of indictments will be between 30 and 40." Citations and stern letters of reprimand all around. Pay your paltry fine to the clerk as you leave. |
| Posted by: Fordesque 2006-04-10 12:04 |