Madrid Bombings

The Madrid attacks took place on March 11 2004 and consisted of a series of ten explosions aboard four commuter trains connecting Alcalá de Henares (where Latin American and Eastern European immigrant communities live) to the southeast of Madrid. Four bombs exploded at 7:39a.m. at Atocha station on train 21431, and simultaneously three bombs exploded just outside Calle Tellez station on train 17305. A few minutes later, at 7:41 two bombs exploded on train 21435 at El Pozo del Tìo Raimundo station. At 7:42 one further explosion occurred on a train 21713 at Santa Eugenia station. The number of victims was the highest in all the history of terrorist attacks in Spain: 191 people died (177 at the scene and 13 in hospital). More than 1,800 were injured. According to the police, the bombs aboard the Atocha and Téllez trains were designed to bring down the roof of the Atocha station and aimed to cause an even higher number of victims. In the process of attributing the responsibility for the Madrid attacks there were two phases: the ETA hypothesis and the Al Qa’ida hypothesis. There are several indicators that in the days immediately following March 11 and immediately before March 14 (the election day in Spain) there was an unsuccessful attempt by the Spanish government to use the attacks for political purposes. One hour after the attack the prime minister José María Aznar said that ETA was surely responsible for it. A long tradition of terrorist attacks staged by the Basque separatist group to demand independence and two similar abortive attempts made it reasonable that ETA might be suspected. But from the beginning a sports bag containing an unexploded bomb and a cell-phone configured in Arabic was found near the sites of the explosion. This fact was ignored. Aznar called the director of El Periòdico Antonio Franco and the director of El País Jesús Ceberio to assure them that ETA was behind the bombings. On the same day the Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio sent a message to all Spanish embassies declaring again that ETA was without any doubt responsible for the attacks. . On Sunday, March 14, the day of the election, an editorial published in El País stated: “The prime minister gave his word to the heads of the media so that they would present the attacks as the work of the ETA terrorist group.”. On the same day Spain’s socialists won the election defeating the Popular Party and Aznar. Also Antonio Franco, the director of the other main Spanish newspaper, decided to make public the reasons for the mistake they had made by attributing the attacks to the Basque terrorism: “It was then that I, convinced that the prime minister of my country was unable, in the exercise of his duty, of giving assurances about something he was not completely sure about, decided on the headline ETA’s M-11”. However, the ETA hypothesis during the first days gained consent also in the international debate: the UN Security Council, at the request of the Spanish government, passed Resolution 1530 condemning the attacks and accusing ETA of being responsible: “the resolution condemns in the strongest terms the bomb attack in Madrid, Spain, perpetrated by the terrorist group ETA”. A few days later the Spanish ambassador had to submit an apologetic letter explaining the new progress of the investigation (involving Al Qa’ida). Four days after the attacks, on March 16 an article published by the Washington Post reported that “the Spanish government knew early on that there was evidence pointing to Islamic terrorism, but they instructed the police to keep quiet about it and instead pushed the idea that ETA was behind it”. On March 18 the Inter Press Service published an article entitled “Spanish Reporters: Government Silenced the Truth About the Attack”, where it was stated: “EFE (a group representing reporters and editors at Spain’s state run news agency) knew, from the very morning of last Thursday’s attacks in Madrid, about the existence of a cell-phone configured in Arabic and about a van found in Alcalà de Henares, and knew that one of the dead was a terrorist.”. The list of events, politicians’ statements, and comments could be cited further . The political use of the terror made by the government and the Spanish Popular Party in the days immediately after the massacres seems a reasonable hypothesis, even if it cannot be proved. Among the reasons that can explain why this falsification could be found out after such a short time, there are also some “objective” clues that caused international public opinion to focus on the Al Qa’ida hypothesis. For example, the high symbolic significance of the data: the attacks occurred exactly 912 days after September 11 (“9-11”). There were 911 days in between the two events. Moreover, the circumstance that ETA, which usually claims responsibility for its actions, strongly denied any responsibility. In the case of March 11, by shifting from the ETA to the Al Qa’ida hypothesis, there is an implied shift from the structure of the counter-memory in to that of the public memory designed by the state and the civil society realigned. In other terms, the State and the civil society agree on the definition of what happened. When the Al Qa’ida hyphotesis has preivaled, it has emerged a shared representation of the event, even if also in the case of March 11 the realigment between State and civil society could not be definitive. On 11 April 2006 Judge Juan del Olmo charged 29 suspects for their involvement in the attacks. The Madrid trial began on 15 February 2007. Any link of the attacks with ETA resulted totally misleading. On August 2007, al-Qaida claimed to be proud about the slaughter. The last audience of the trial was held on July 2007, and on October 31 the Audiencia National de Espana delivered its verdicts: “local cells of Islamic extremists inspired through the Internet” were found guilty, 21 of the defendants were condemned. Shortly after the 11 March attacks, on April 2, there was a failed bombing attempt on high-speed (AVE) train: a railway worker found a blue plastic bag on the railway track between Madrid and Seville, averting a disaster potentially even greater than that of March 11. The perpetrators remained unknown.