MADRID, 13 March 2004 — The bomb attacks in Madrid have raised the stakes for Spain’s ruling People’s Party which could suffer in elections due tomorrow if the blasts prove to be linked to its unpopular decision to back the US-led invasion of Iraq. Although the government is maintaining that the series of blasts on rush-hour commuter trains that killed 198 people Thursday was probably the work of the separatist Basque group ETA, the Al-Qaeda network has claimed responsibility in a statement sent to the London-based daily Al-Quds Al-Arabia.
Although campaigning was cut short out of respect for the victims, and three days of national mourning were declared, the elections are to go ahead as planned.
The PP, which had been leading the race up to the day of the attacks, would benefit if ETA — against which it has long taken a hard line — was blamed, observers said.
“If it turns out to be ETA.... in an attempt to influence the elections, it must know that this would favor a large majority for the PP in the general elections,” the economic daily Cinco Dias said.
But if claims by Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda that the blasts were retaliation for Spain’s support of the US-led invasion of Iraq were upheld, the left-wing opposition led by the Socialist Party could well benefit.
“The society is going to vote with pain and tears, but it will do so freely,” the leader of the minor left-wing Izquierda Unida party, Gaspar Llamazares, was quoted as saying in the newspaper Expansion.
Aznar’s government gave its wholehearted support to the United States on Iraq, despite overwhelming public opposition.
State officials pointed the finger at ETA immediately after the blasts. The Basque militant group has been blamed for the deaths of more than 800 people in its 36-year violent campaign for an independent northern homeland.
But they wavered when a stolen van containing detonators and an audio tape in Arabic reciting Qur’anic verses was found in a town east of Madrid that was the point of origin for the four trains targeted in the attacks. Claims in an e-mail London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi said it had received from a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda that the attack “was a part of the settling of old scores with crusader Spain, America’s ally in its war against Islam,” shook matters further. Spanish police cast doubt on the authenticity of the statement.
Experts, including the head of the European police organization Europol and some US officials, said it was too early to definitively pin blame on any one group.
ETA’s banned political wing, Batasuna, denied the separatist group was involved, pointing out that it usually gave warnings of attacks in public places — something that did not precede the blasts.
But yesterday, the Spanish government returned to insisting ETA, not an Islamic group, was behind the atrocity.
