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| Fingerprint Led to U.S. Madrid Bomb Suspect | |||
| 2004-05-07 | |||
An American lawyer arrested in the United States was being held as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings after investigators found a fingerprint on a bag linked to the bombers, Spanish police sources said on Friday. Investigators found the bag containing detonators in a van outside a station where the bombers were believed to have boarded trains before the March 11 attacks.
When no match for the single fingerprint was found in Spain, police distributed it abroad, including to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman said. Brandon Mayfield, a convert to Islam who married an Egyptian woman, would be the first American implicated in the case. U.S. officials have yet to confirm the arrest, which was reported by Mayfield's brother and Spanish officials after Newsweek magazine broke the story. Spanish police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI had found more evidence in the fingerprint than had the investigators in Spain. The FBI discovered 15 points of similarity between the fingerprint on the bag and Mayfield's corresponding finger, but police in Spain found only eight points of similarity, the Spanish police sources said. Several other unidentified fingerprints also were found on that bag, the sources said. There is no international standard for the number of points of identification required for a match between two fingerprints, according to CrimTrac, an Australian agency that assists police.
An FBI spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny the detention, saying only that two search warrants had been issued in connection with an unspecified investigation. Newsweek said the lawyer had done child custody work for one of six Oregon Muslims convicted last year of trying to travel to Afghanistan to help al Qaeda -- the network blamed for the Madrid bombings and the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. The magazine quoted sources as saying the lawyer had been under FBI surveillance for some time and was being held as a "material witness" in a grand jury investigation. That allowed the U.S. Justice Department to hold him in secret without formally filing charges. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. Mayfield, a former U.S. Army officer, was critical of the foreign policy of President Bush's administration, his brother said. Reached at his home in Halstead, Kansas, Kent Mayfield told Reuters on Thursday: "I can swear up and down my brother has no connection to terrorist attacks."
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| Posted by:Steve |
| #18 The Enemy Within comes in many shapes sizes and colors Exactly Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-07 7:50:07 PM "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly. But a traitor moves among those within the gate freely, and his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys are heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to their victims and wears their face and their garments, and appeals to the baseness which lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of the nation; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." |
| Posted by: Anonymous4617 2004-05-08 2:53:48 AM |
| #17 Thank you #15. |
| Posted by: Anonymous4617 2004-05-08 2:49:32 AM |
| #16 Stop it, girls. You're both pretty. Only to someone with such peculiar tastes as yours, RC. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-05-08 12:58:49 AM |
| #15 My question is a little bit off topic: Is Terry Nichols's wife a muslim? I know she is philippino but is she a muslim? On the Sunday before the Oklahoma City bombing the Nichols family went to a local church to celebrate Easter. That afternoon the family was sitting down to their Easter dinner when McVeigh called and asked Nichols to drive with him to Oklahoma City to drop off McVeigh's get-away car there. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-07 10:21:36 PM |
| #14 Ouch!!!! Too harsh Robert! LOL |
| Posted by: whitecollar redneck 2004-05-07 7:57:54 PM |
| #13 Send the bastard to an "undisclosed location". No pictures. JLH - The Enemy Within comes in many shapes sizes and colors Exactly |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-07 7:50:07 PM |
| #12 Stop it, girls. You're both pretty. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-05-07 7:37:17 PM |
| #11 I'm going to close this waste of bandwidth by saying that your intelligence is only exceeded by your eloquence, Jen. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-05-07 6:30:39 PM |
| #10 Gee, Mr. Douche Bag, are you still saying you're available? |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-07 6:11:38 PM |
| #9 Jen, your vitriol has all the potency of vinegar. I suggest that you mix it in proper proportion with water and self-administer the resulting solution as women have done for centuries. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-05-07 6:09:04 PM |
| #8 Speaking of turds, I can't believe the way you show up here day after day when we've thoroughly and completely spanked you the day before. I guess you hope that nobody will remember. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-07 5:22:03 PM |
| #7 Andrew Riley, writing in the Daily Telegraph says that in Britain, fingerprint experts commonly need 16 points of comparison between two sets of fingerprints before they will agree to give evidence in court. But in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, the figure was 12 points and in parts of India, eight points. ---------------------------------------- 15 points is good ... It's more than good, it's totally d@mning evidence. If there is a proven link with the Madrid atrocity I hope this maggot never again sees the light of day for the rest of his natural life. There had best be no plea bargaining for this turd. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-05-07 5:16:12 PM |
| #6 Odd that most of these guys are Islamic males between the ages of 15 and 35. But hey, let's not racially profile them or anything, we wouldn't want them to get offended. |
| Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-05-07 5:06:40 PM |
| #5 15 points is a good match, but the fact he's also a muslim convert greatly increases the probability of a correct ID. Still it's kind of weird. |
| Posted by: virginian 2004-05-07 3:48:11 PM |
| #4 What else did Kent Mayfield say? From a previous Reuters article via Daniel Aronstein and PowerLine: "I think the reason they are holding him is because he is of the Muslim faith and because he is not super happy with the Bush administration. So if that's a crime, well you can burn half of us," Kent Mayfield [Brandon's brother] said. Yeah, uh huh. I'm sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with his fingerprints being all over one of the backpacks. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2004-05-07 3:35:07 PM |
| #3 My question is a little bit off topic: Is Terry Nichols's wife a muslim? I know she is philippino but is she a muslim? |
| Posted by: Anonymous3964 2004-05-07 2:56:44 PM |
| #2 but often prays 5 times a day to Mecca, no? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-07 2:24:26 PM |
| #1 The Enemy Within comes in many shapes sizes and colors. |
| Posted by: John Long Hair 2004-05-07 2:15:11 PM |