MADRID, 16 February 2007 — An Egyptian accused of being one of the masterminds of the Madrid terror attacks told a court yesterday he had no involvement in the bombings, despite intercepted conversations in which he allegedly bragged that he was the brains behind them.
“I never had any relation to the events which occurred in Madrid,” Rabei Osman said under questioning from his defense attorney on the first day of the trial of suspects in Europe’s worst Islamic-linked attack. The string of 10 bombings on rush-hour commuter trains in March 2004 killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800.
The first defendant to take the stand, Osman said in Arabic that he condemned the Madrid attack “unconditionally and completely. This is a conviction I have very clearly and absolutely.” He also said he condemned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the London subway bombings of 2005.
Osman was arrested in Milan, Italy, in June 2004 on a warrant from Spanish authorities. Of 29 people who went on trial here yesterday, he is one of three accused of masterminding the attacks.
Italian prosecutors have said they tapped phone conversations in which Osman told an associate in Italy, “I’m the thread to Madrid, it’s my work.” Earlier, Osman refused to answer questions from prosecutors, as is his right under Spanish law.
The trial has ignited painful memories of what Spaniards consider the nation’s most traumatic event since the 1930s civil war. Images of body bags and twisted train cars were played and replayed on Spanish television yesterday, a grim reminder of the devastation.
At the trial 18 of the suspects watched the proceedings from a bulletproof chamber, packed together on wooden benches, while the other 11, who are out on bail, sat in the main section of the courtroom.
Many of the suspects in the bulletproof chamber averted their glance from victims’ relatives sitting in the small, heavily guarded courtroom, and some turned their backs to them.
“I hope justice is rendered and that there is a worthy sentence,” Pilar Manjon, president of an association of March 11 victims, said before the proceedings got under way. She lost her 20-year-old son in the bombings.
Of the defendants, Manjon said: “I will look them right in the eye. They destroyed my life but they will not destroy me.” Seven defendants face possible prison terms of 30 years for each of the killings and 18 years apiece for 1,820 attempted murders. But under Spanish law, the maximum time anyone can serve for a terrorist conviction is 40 years.
Three of those seven are considered to have masterminded the attack, including Osman, and three to have placed bombs on trains. Seven other organizers killed themselves three weeks after the bombings as police moved in to arrest them in an apartment outside Madrid.
Other lower-profile defendants face charges ranging from belonging to a terrorist organization to stealing explosives from a mine in northern Spain and passing them on to the bombers in exchange for money and drugs. This is the charge against the nine Spaniards, one of them a woman, who are on trial in the case.
Testimony is expected to last more than five months, and a verdict was expected in late October.
The trial follows an investigation which concluded that the attack was carried out by a homegrown cell of Muslim extremists angry over the then-conservative government’s support for the Iraq war and its troop presence in Afghanistan. The cell was inspired by Al-Qaeda, but had no direct links to it, nor did it receive financing from Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist organization, Spanish investigators say.
The government at the time initially blamed Basque separatists, and continued to do so even as evidence emerged of radical involvement.
