A Spanish anti-terrorism court delivered an unexpectedly mixed verdict in the trial of 28 defendants charged in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. It convicted 21 people of involvement in the carnage, but acquitted seven others, including the man accused by prosecutors of having masterminded Europe’s second-deadliest terrorist attack after Lockerbie. Only three of those found guilty were convicted for mass murder.

 

A total of 191 people died when ten bombs made of dynamite and nails and packed into backpacks tore through four commuter trains during rush hour on the morning of March 11, 2004. Another 1,800 commuters were injured in the coordinated attacks, known as 11-M in Spain.

 

In a public reading of a summary of the 700-page judgment, Chief Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez on October 31 pronounced that three lead suspects — two Moroccans, Jamal Zougam, 33, Othman el-Gnaoui, 32, and one Spaniard, José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, 35 — were guilty of mass murder. They received sentences ranging from 34,000 to 43,000 years in prison. Under Spanish law, however, the most time they can spend in jail is 40 years; Spanish law permits neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment.

 

Rebuffing the prosecution, the court said there was not enough evidence to determine exactly who masterminded the attacks. Thus the man prosecutors claimed had organized the bombings, 30-year-old Rabei Osman el-Sayed Ahmed (also known as “Mohammed the Egyptian”), was acquitted on all charges, including mass murder, attempted murder, criminal damage and membership in a terrorist group.

 

 

Spanish prosecutors had argued that Osman, who was arrested in Milan in June 2004 after his telephone conversations were wiretapped, was the main link between the Madrid bombers and other Islamic terrorist groups. As evidence they presented recordings of a phone conversation in which Osman was said to be boasting of his part in planning the Madrid attacks.

 

The Italian translation of those conversations (originally in Arabic), however, was disputed in court after Spanish translators provided more ambiguous interpretations of his remarks, which in any case did not amount to a confession. Osman currently is serving an eight-year prison sentence in Italy for belonging to a terrorist organization.

 

Zougam was convicted as a material author of the attacks. He was also accused of planting some of the bombs on the trains. Moreover, the only bomb that police were able to deactivate (out of a total of 13 bombs, ten exploded, two were detonated by police and one was deactivated) contained a mobile telephone SIM card that led directly to a phone shop run by Zougam.

 

El-Gnaoui was convicted of being an accessory to multiple counts of murder and attempted murder for transporting explosives to a home near Madrid where the bombs were assembled.

 

Four other top suspects — Youssef Belhadj, Hassan el-Haski, Abdulmajid Bouchar and Rafa Zouhier — were acquitted of murder but convicted of second-tier charges including membership in a terrorist organization. The 14 remaining defendants received lesser sentences ranging from ten to three years in prison.

 

Only four of the nine Spanish-born defendants were convicted. All of them belonged to a ring of explosives traffickers headed by Trashorras. Judge Bermúdez sentenced Trashorras to a long sentence for his role as an accomplice in the attack. Trashorras, a former miner with schizophrenia from the Asturias region in northern Spain, supplied the stolen dynamite used in the bombings in exchange for drugs.

 

So who was ultimately responsible for 11-M? Probably the seven individuals who committed suicide when their safe house in the Madrid suburb of Leganés was surrounded by police three weeks after the bombings. DNA and other evidence suggest that they were the ones who planted the bombs on the trains.

 

Four others, meanwhile, remain fugitives, although two of those are believed later to have been killed in suicide attacks against US-led forces in Iraq.

 

 

Judge Bermúdez said there was no direct link between the Madrid suspects and Al Qaeda. He said only that the plotters belonged to a “jihadist terrorist cell” with links to known militants in Algeria, Libya and Morocco “which ... through the use of violence in all of its manifestations, seek to topple democratic regimes and eliminate the Christian-Western culture, replacing it with an Islamic state under the rule of the sharia, or Islamic law, in its most radical, extreme and minority interpretation.”

 

The verdict implies that the attacks were carried out by a local group of loosely connected Islamic radicals who linked up with a gang of Moroccan drug dealers. In other words, 11-M was a local job executed without outside assistance and funded by a Madrid-based drug dealing racket.

 

Judge Bermúdez also proclaimed that Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the militant Basque separatist group, had no role in 11-M, a pronouncement that should put to rest several conspiracy theories propagated by Spanish right-wingers. José María Aznar, who was completing eight years as prime minister at the time of the attacks, had initially blamed ETA for the Madrid attacks and maintained that position for several days, despite mounting evidence that the bombs were the work of Islamic terrorists.

 

His decision to do so (together with the fact that many Spaniards thought the bombings were in retaliation Spain’s controversial participation in the Iraq war) changed the course of politics in Spain. On March 14, 2004, just three days after the attacks, Aznar’s center-right Popular Party lost the general elections to the Socialist Party, which unexpectedly vaulted José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero from out of nowhere into office as the new prime minister.

 

Ever since then, Spanish politics has been marked by divisions and angry recriminations. Some conservative politicians and their supporters in the right-wing media, believing the PP was cheated out of an election victory, continue to insist that ETA, not Islamic militants, were responsible for 11-M, and they accuse the Socialist government of covering up the truth about 11-M for political reasons.

 

On the other hand, Judge Bermúdez also disputed the Socialist argument that the Madrid bombings were in retaliation for Spain’s role in Iraq. In fact, the trial disclosed that the plan to attack in Spain was first discussed at a meeting in Istanbul in February 2002, more than one year before the Iraq was invaded. Thus a number of Spanish commentators say that Spain was and continues to be a target for Islamic fundamentalists who believe the former Muslim lands of “al-Andalus” in southern Spain, which were conquered by Christian armies in 1492, need to be recovered for Islam.

 

 

The fact that only three defendants were charged with mass murder has infuriated survivors of the attacks and relatives of the victims, who say justice has not been served.

 

Prosecutors sought symbolic sentences of up to 38,976 years each for the eight lead defendants—30 years for each of those killed in the attacks, 18 years for each of the wounded, plus more time for other terrorism-related charges.

 

Due to a recent reform of the penal code, however, those receiving the longest sentences will serve no more than 40-year terms, the maximum that Spain allows. Those convicted of second-tier crimes will be credited with their three years in preventative detention and may be released within a few months.

 

Much of the evidence against the accused was circumstantial, and although such indirect evidence is admissible in a Spanish court, the judges are thought by legal Spanish scholars to have avoided relying upon it because other high-profile terror cases have been overturned on appeal.

 

Some legal experts say the 11-M trial calls into question whether Spain’s judicial system is sufficiently up-to-date to prosecute Islamic terrorists through the courts. They say the verdicts highlight the difficulty of building a solid legal case against defendants who are moral supporters of Islamist conspiracies but not directly involved in the violence.

 

Other analysts say that in this case, the judges applied a very narrow interpretation of the law. They warn that the Spanish court system will need to undergo fundamental reforms (especially as relates to the rules of evidence) if the country is ever to defeat Islamist terrorism.

 

In any case, the trial was never likely to deliver the verdict for which many were hoping because those thought to be the true masterminds of 11-M are dead. Nevertheless, the trial has left many questions unanswered.

 

Immediately following the verdict, Zapatero said: “Justice was rendered today.” But many Spaniards do not agree. With only five months to go before the next general election, Spain has not heard the last of 11-M.