MADRID, 28 July 2004 — No evidence has emerged to suggest any collaboration or connection between the Basque separatist movement ETA and extremist Islamist organizations, French Anti-Terrorist Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told Spanish radio yesterday.
“We have uncovered no document showing a link, not even of a logistical nature, between ETA and Islamist organizations,” Bruguiere, an expert on the Al-Qaeda terror network, told broadcaster Cadena Ser.
Bruguiere has previously interviewed Jamal Zougam, considered to have played a leading role in the bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, which killed 191 people in Spain’s worst-ever terrorist outrage.
Bruguiere questioned Zougam, now in Spanish custody, as part of an investigation begun in 1998 and focusing on young French radicals recruited to train at Al-Qaeda-affiliated camps in Afghanistan who are believed to have spent some time in Spain.
“That is to say this network existed, but I don’t know that one could have anticipated or imagined an attack (such as March 11),” the judge said.
“We are facing a very different threat from that of ETA,” he warned.
“We are up against terrorism of the third millennium whose structure is global, ideological and loose,” Bruguiere went on.
Spain’s former conservative government under Jose Maria Aznar, whose Popular Party lost general elections held three days after the Madrid bombings, initially pinned the blame on ETA, which has killed some 800 people in three decades fighting for an independent state in northern Spain.
Aznar’s party still maintained ETA was behind the blasts even as evidence emerged fingering Moroccan extremists believed to be affiliated to Al-Qaeda.
Of 19 people in custody in connection with the blasts 17 are Moroccan nationals. Last week PP Member of Parliament Jaime Ignacio del Burgo told a parliamentary commission of enquiry into the blasts he believed there was reason to suppose a link between ETA and Islamists and criticized the new Socialist government for not exploring that theory.
