MADRID, 5 April 2004 — First there was the attack on four commuter trains that left almost 200 dead on March 11. Then came last Friday’s attempted bombing of the Madrid-Seville rail line.
Now an explosion with all the hallmarks of “holy war” has rocked a busy Madrid residential area. For Spain, there is no respite.
For nearly 40 years the country has lived with the terror of the Basque underground group ETA. Now it is experiencing a completely new and scarcely comprehensible type of threat.
The hope of many that things could return to normal after the March 11 massacre has proved a false one.
“More and more it seems to be the beginning of a nightmare,” said one traveler of the Atocha station in Madrid as she waited in vain for her train to leave after Friday’s bomb discovery.
“The alarming conclusion is that Spain has found itself in the crosshairs of Islamic terrorists,” said the Spanish daily El Mundo. Investigators are convinced that Spain is no longer just an important fallback area for the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, but has become a central base of operations — and a main target. And the possibility of new attacks can in no way be disregarded.
Events after March 11 prove that the Madrid carnage was only the beginning of a new wave of “holy war” in Europe, the daily El Pais quoted an anti-terrorism expert as saying. Politicians are warning it is cynical to differentiate between countries like the Spain of former Premier Jose Maria Aznar, who supported the Iraq war, and those that did not. All are threatened.
In Spain, this has led to a situation where for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), the military is cooperating massively in the defense against terror. Until now, that was only the case in sporadic major attacks.
Soldiers are now guarding not only strategic installations like nuclear power plants, oil refineries and dams, but — after Friday’s bomb scare — highways and train stations, too. Another significant development was the presence of Defense Minister Federico Trillo and Army Chief Antonio Moreno Barbera at the presentation of a new security plan at the Interior Ministry.
Also unsettling for many Spaniards was the fact that attacks had occurred in Madrid on March 11, three days before parliamentary elections, amid the highest level of security with thousands of police in place. An attack by ETA had been anticipated.
“We believed the Al-Qaeda people were under control in Spain, and therefore we thought we were safe,” said one police official. “The government would not have seen the terrorists, even if they had been under its nose,” wrote El Pais.
