BERLIN, 15 March 2004 — Messages claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombings in the name of Al-Qaeda are hard to verify and may be attempts by obscure factions to identify themselves with the world’s leading militant “brand”. Security analysts said yesterday the discovery by Spanish police of a videotape with a purported Al-Qaeda claim was still inconclusive, although it added to mounting evidence of an Islamist link to the attacks that killed 200 people.
The speaker on the tape was named as Abu Dujan Al-Afgani and described as Al-Qaeda’s military spokesman in Europe, although Spain’s interior minister said neither Spanish nor foreign intelligence officials had heard of him.
It came days after a similar statement from a group called Abu Hafs Al-Masri, claiming links to Al-Qaeda, in an e-mail to a London-based Arab newspaper. Basque separatist group ETA, originally blamed by Spain, has denied involvement.
For unknown groups or individuals to take credit for such attacks is not new, and such claims may amount to nothing more than hoaxes or self-publicity. On the other hand, said German security analyst Berndt Georg Thamm, they may signal the real emergence of new actors, drawn from among the tens of thousands of “non-aligned Mujahedeen” fighters who trained in Osama Bin Laden’s Afghan camps throughout the 1990s.
Intelligence services have long warned of the likelihood that trained Islamist militant “sleepers” are living quietly in Europe and biding their time before launching attacks.
“They still exist, including still in Europe. That is the great unknown for the security authorities,” Thamm said. Experts said it was not typical of the original Al-Qaeda to claim responsibility in the immediate aftermath of an attack, or even at all. After the September 11 attacks on US cities in 2001, it was months before videotapes emerged in which Bin Laden exulted over the success of the suicide hijackers and boasted that the destruction of the World Trade Center had exceeded Al-Qaeda’s highest expectations.
More recently, however, claims of responsibility have become more frequent and more rapid. Abu Hafs Al-Masri associated itself, for example, with two sets of suicide bombings in Turkey last November, and with a truck bomb that devastated the UN headquarters in Baghdad last August.
Security analysts say such claims reflect a desire by militant groups to link themselves to Al-Qaeda and exploit its name as a “seal of quality” in the Islamist militant world.
They illustrate the transformation of Al-Qaeda itself from an organization into a wider cause, and the elevation of bin Laden from operational guerrilla commander to a symbol of global jihad (holy war) and confrontation with the United States.
Thamm said that despite the videotape, the e-mail claim, the arrest of three Moroccans and two Indians on Saturday, and the earlier discovery of detonators and a tape of Qur’anic verses in an abandoned van, he was still not convinced of Al-Qaeda involvement in Madrid because of the absence of suicide bombers.
