Lourdes Pérez

Madrid

Sunday, 10 March 2024, 21:46

Another 189 train passengers, like little Patricia and her parents, were setting off at this early hour, when the fog of sleep still lulled their spirits, to board the carriages that plied the Henares railway corridor without any fear that there would be no more journeys for them. Simple people who went to work, to study, perhaps to return back home after a night shift. There were people from Vallecas. From Entrevías and Santa Eugenia. The people of Pozo del Tío Raimundo. It was easy for the terrorists to kill those who only took a train, unprotected, to make a living.

None of those 192 people could ever have guessed that alongside them were the killers, their nine assassins, camouflaged among the anonymous faces; the backpacks with their contents of death - several kilos of Goma 2 Eco reinforced with shrapnel, detonators and mobile phones whose alarm acted as a timer - on the shoulders of bodies that lost their souls in exchange for a fantastical immortality in the name of Allah.

The innocent, vulnerable travellers, murdered en masse and at random to recreate hell on earth, advancing towards their end without suspecting that the shocking outcome has long been decreed by a certain Jamal Zougam, the Moroccan manager of a telephone shop in Lavapiés who the police had already targeted, and his cronies fanaticised in Jihad. That the explosives had been provided by José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, someone who knew about explosives and what the deadly charges would be; a small-time crook with a psychic disorder caused by drugs who had become a criminal and police informer. That the threat to attack Spain, the dream of Al-Andalus, was forged at a summit in 2001 in Pakistan, two years before the global demon, Osama Bin Laden, targeted the country for its involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, following the publication of a photo of the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, in the Azores with George Bush Jr. and Tony Blair.

But on that morning in March, none of the passengers, except for the murderers, need not have known that they were potential targets of the most radicalised Islamism that had imprinted scars of martyrdom in distant places on the planet. Places far removed from the Renfe Cercanías carriages that approach the heart of Madrid with their incessant rattle of comings and goings. Shortly after seven in the morning, the witnesses who did not yet know they would have to become witnesses crossed paths, unconcerned, with at least a couple of men entering and leaving the train in Alcalá de Henares carrying their backpacks of horror.

The 2143 commuter train on which Patricia, her mother and father were travelling ground to a halt on track 2 at Atocha. The clock stopped at 7.37. And with it, so did life.

Three explosions in the space of a minute gutted as many carriages with such devastating and uncontrollable violence that the vehicles parked around the railway artery bounced on the roads.

"I'm going to pray," muttered a grandmother of four grandchildren who was surprised by the bombs in the vicinity of the station, but what else can you do when God, any God, has erased the most essential humanity, in these trains transformed into coffins for the corpses dismembered in an instant, from which the survivors tried to flee in desperation, driven by panic, breaking the windows, where respect for the dead gave way in order to save those who were still breathing?

Amidst the crowd of bloodied dazed casualties, under the noise of mobile phones, a young man, a paediatrics students at the Doce de Octubre hospital, found Patricia, the blonde-haired baby girl with her little golden bracelet, barely seven months old, among the rubble on the platform. The memory for the trainee paediatrician will remain wth him forever.

In spite of everything, we have to thank luck for its mercy. The bomb squad detonated a fourth rucksack that failed to explode. A few hundred metres away, on the parallel track of Calle Téllez, another four bombs split open the 17305 train as the chain of terror contnued to unfold. The unit approached Atocha a couple of minutes late. One hundred and twenty seconds, annoying anyone in a hurry, but it was life-saving for so many because the delay prevented the carriages from exploding in the middle of the busy station and unleashing an apocalypse of collapse and terror.

Only three minutes elapsed between the explosions that flooded Atocha with death. In the middle, almost simultaneously, another explosive device struck suburban train 21713 in Santa Eugenia and another two on 21435 in Pozo del Tío Raimundo, an area which is still full of shantytowns. Paqui, a nurse, escaped from and helped anyone who still had a breath of life left in them. Policeman Isidoro Zamorano, who had just dropped his three children at school, entered the scene of death, sensing the tragedy, immersed in "a strange smell, of gunpowder, of bad things".

And yet again, there was another stroke of luck. The fourth bag abandoned by the terrorists in El Pozo did not detonate. This rucksack, the one that ended up being the key to 11-M, embarked on its journey among the remains of the victims without anyone being suspicious of its lethal contents. Until the bag was found at the Vallecas police station and a bomb squad member took a gamble by deactivating it by hand. And there he found a mobile phone with a SIM card. That was the clue that would lead to Jamal Zougam.

But that would come later, much later. At eight o'clock in the morning, the terror attack had again turned Madrid into the capital of pain. The destruction began to take its toll, the one that would imprint 192 killed and 1,857 wounded on the collective memory. The worst terrorist atrocity Europe has ever faced, comparable only to the bombing of the Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

The Daoiz y Velarde sports centre became an improvised hub to care for the victims arriving from Calle Téllez. Ifema was set up as a gigantic morgue to which the families who cannot find their loved ones ran, praying that today they had not caught a train of death. The people of Madrid took to the streets to help their neighbours, solidarity blood donations guaranteed the supply, taxi drivers gave away free rides to those who gritted their teeth and cried, clinging to any last hope. The Audiencia Nacional entrusted judge Juan del Olmo and prosecutor Olga Sánchez with the investigation of a case that would go down in history.

Jihadism has just recreated New York's 9/11 in Madrid's 11-M, but in the first hour of turmoil and confusion in the face of the ferocious, merciless blow, the country was pointing the finger at ETA. ETA, which has been raising the bar of its actions little by little and which eleven days before this dark day tried to sneak two vans with half a ton of explosives into the Spanish capital, were intercepted by the security forces, in order to push the general elections called for this Sunday, 14 March, to the limit.

"They are not Basques, they are vermin and murderers", boomed the condemnation of the Basque president Juan José Ibarretxe, the first to offer a solemn institutional declaration to define where the good citizens of Euskadi stood, praying that it was not their own people who carried out such an atrocity. The time was 9.35 am. Before Ibarretxe, the PP government spokesperson, Eduardo Zaplana, and the leader of the Socialist opposition, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, also attributed the massacre to the ETA group.

Far from the journalistic focus that tried to answer the who, the how and the why, in an effort as strenuous as it was futile to find the words with which to describe the indescribable, the doorman of a building in Alcalá de Henares alerted the police to the presence of a van with suspicious movements parked near the railway station. It was the white Renault Kangoo stolen in Tetuán by the terrorists of whom nothing was yet known; the one that left evidence of the crimes and a tape with Koranic verses next to another of the Orquesta Mondragón that would in the future, oddly enough, feed the 'conspiracy theory' about the authorship of the attacks.

At midday, the leader of the outlawed Batasuna, Arnaldo Otegi, denied that it was ETA - how did those who accused the rule of law of unjustly incriminating them for terrorist complicity know this? - and someone who was on the opposite side of the fence, the general commissioner of Information, Jesús de la Morena, also added his scepticism about ETA's guilt to the Interior ministry.

Four hours after the massacre, when the always bustling Madrid was gathered in a funeral silence, President Aznar telephoned the press to tell them that there is no valid lead other than that of ETA; the path that the Interior Minister, Ángel Acebes, was following; the one that most of Spain's political leaders were still following; the one that the ambassador to the US, Javier Rupérez, was conveying to George Bush; the one that the foreign minister, Ana de Palacio, would work to ensure that the international chancelleries and the UN take up, despite the fact that the jihadist hypothesis was already gaining ground.

At eight o'clock in the evening, with the public grief-stricken, angry and stunned in an unforgettable mourning, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the carnage in an Arabic-language newspaper in London. And the script for the day of infamy changed track.

The pendulum between half-truth, half-lie and reality swung over the next 72 hours. Millions of people filled Madrid and other cities in Spain, drenched in rain and tears, to cry out against the terror but also to ask aloud 'Who did it? An unstoppable echo that became the 'Pásalo' of the convulsive day of reflection, with the socialist Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba coining a sentence for the newspapers - "Spaniards deserve a government that doesn't lie to them" - and demonstrators gathered in front of the PP headquarters. On 14-M, the electorate punished Aznar and gave the Moncloa to Zapatero.

The terrorists who did not blow themselves up on 3 April in the Leganés flat in which they barricaded themselves ended up being charged and sentenced.

After 21 months of investigation, judge Juan del Olmo tried Moroccan national Jamal Zougam, among several others, for his participation in carrying out the attack. Although claims had been made that attacks were linked to al-Qaeda, investigations conducted by Spanish officials did not find any proven links to the terror group.

The trial of 29 defendants began on 15 February 2007. During the trial the defendants retracted their previous statements to the authorities and denied any involvement. On 31 October 2007, Spain's Audiencia Nacional court handed down its judgements. Of the 28 defendants on trial, 21 were found guilty on a range of charges ranging from forgery to murder. Two of the defendants were sentenced to more than 40,000 years in prison each.