21 guilty of Madrid bombings

Last Modified: 31 Oct 2007
By: Sue Turton

Three years after the Madrid bombing 21 are jailed. Seven, including three of the alleged masterminds, are cleared.

Three and a half years on from 11 March 2004 - today the Spanish people were to learn who was behind mainland Europe's deadliest terrorist attack. But of the eight defendants accused of the most severe charge, mass murder, just three were convicted.

The first was 23-year-old Moroccan Jamal Zougam.

"We convict Jamal Zougam of belonging to an armed or terrorist group, 191 crimes of homicide together with two crimes of abortion, 1,856 crimes of attempted terrorist homicide and four crimes of terrorist damages." - Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez

Another Moroccan, 32-year-old Otman el Gnaoui, was next - found guilty of transporting the explosives. And the third, a Spaniard, Emilio Suarez Trashorras who had stolen the bomb making equipment - he'd been paid 1,000 kilos of hashish

Madrid: three years after the bomb

191 people were killed and more than 18 hundred injured when nail bombs were detonated on four crowded commuter trains in Madrid. Three years on, 21people have been found guilty of involvement in Europe's worst Islamist terrorist attack.

Three of them were given maximum sentences of thousands of years in prison, but another three alleged masterminds were cleared. The bombings had a major impact on Spanish politics. Initially the government blamed Basque separatists, and it was thrown out by the voters when it became clear that ETA had nothing to do with them.

All three were sentenced to 40,000 years - a multiple of the numbers of people killed or injured although the maximum sentence they can serve under Spanish law is 40.

But these men were not the masterminds. An other man, Rabei Osman had been accused of being one of those. He's currently serving a ten year sentence in Italy for links to terror cells in Europe and Iraq - he listened to the verdict from a court in Rome.

The judge, Javier Gomez Bermudez, said, "Please be quiet. Rabei Osman, Javier Gonzales Dias, and Ivan Granado Pena, are absolved of all crimes they stood accused of."

His acquittal drew gasps from onlookers and the Spanish press and outside the courthouse disappointment amongst victims and relatives of those who died.

"We were convinced that there were more people behind the attacks, not as part of a conspiracy theory, we simply believed that not only those who sat there were responsible. " = Juan Carlos Vives Segura, Terrorism Victims Association

"After the magnitude of the attack they committed against all those people, the Barajas airport bombing and all and it's for nothing, life goes on. Justice should change." - Carlos Zoria, victim

What did the guilty do in the attacks?

So what role did the three guilty men play in the murders of 191 people that March morning? They were behind the supply of explosives that resulted in blasts across four separate locations in Madrid.

Jamal Zougam was the first man to be arrested. Police traced him from a SIM card found in an unexploded bomb - he owned a phone shop and supplied the mobile phones used as detonators in the 10 rucksack bombs. His fingerprints were in the house outside Madrid where the bombs were manufactured.

Othman el Gnaoui was one of the ringleaders - his main role was to transport the explosives from Northern Spain to a house near Madrid where the bombs were prepared. And he forged documents for the operation.

The only Spaniard found guilty of mass murder was Emilio Suarez Trashorras. The former miner from the northern region of Asturias was described in court as the leader of the Spaniards who supplied the explosives to the bombers.

In total 21 of the 28 defendants were driven back to jail, convicted of being involved in some way - but many on lesser charges than the prosecution had pursued, much of the evidence was circumstantial.

The evidence against Rabei Osman, also known as the Egyptian, consisted of wiretapped conversations where he claimed he'd planned the train bombings.

Another 11 men believed to have been behind the attacks escaped trial in one way or another. Seven of the alleged ringleaders blew themselves up when police surrounded their flat in Madrid three weeks after the bombings.

A new socialist government

March 11th 2004 marked a sea change in Spain's political landscape - the conservative's government's insistence that ETA was behind the bombs backfired. The socialists were elected to power three days later and Spanish troops were pulled out of Iraq believing al Qaida was behind the bombings.

But Rabei Osman was the suspected link to al-Qaida and he was acquitted. No evidence was found that the defendants had attended al-Qaida training camps.

But was there a British link to the Madrid atrocities? The then Metropolitan Police commissioner John Stevens said a definite link had been made between cells in Madrid and the UK, but only phone calls. not meetings were discovered. Zougam did attend the Finsbury Park Mosque in the 1990s - it's not known if he was radicalised there.

For the Spanish, today's verdicts have been far from conclusive, the feeling that many of those responsible for such suffering have escaped justice.