THE MADRID BOMBING

Who, why and to a lesser extent, even how the attacks of March 11 were carried out remains undetermined to this very day. A commission set up by the Spanish government is currently investigating the attack, with its findings anticipated early 2005.

However, some of what has been culled about the origins of the attack point to the alarming emergence of an Islamist terrorist network that will likely plague Europe for well into the future.

Yarkas, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the many Muslims whom police arrested after the 9/11 attack.

The Origins of the Bombing
The story began in 1986, when a Syrian refugee by the name of Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah, arrived in Spain. Yarkas was a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a revolutionary jihadist group determined to establish Islamic theocracies across the Arab world. The Syrian government had brutally crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, scattering its remnants into exile, mostly to Europe. As a member of this diaspora, Yarkas settled down in Spain, married and became a car salesman.

In 1995, an al-Qaeda cell was formed in Spain, led by Yarkas. He began making contacts with other al-Qaeda cells across Europe and to the terrorist group's leadership in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was residing. Yarkas recruited a group of like-minded cadre around him, many of whom would go and fight in Chechnya, Bosnia and in Afghanistan, and would be involved in 9/11, the Casablanca and Madrid terrorist attacks. One key recruit was a Moroccan by the name of Amer el Azizi, who became Yarkas' right-hand man.

Azizi soon became a courier among the al-Qaeda cells in Europe, often traveling to Afghanistan and Turkey. He recruited North African sympathizers as foot soldiers. Later Azizi allegedly formed an alliance with the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi .

The 9/11 Attack
Together, Yarkas and Azizi provided logistical support to the Hamburg cell, who by 2000 and 2001 was gearing up to carry out 9/11. In fact, in July of 2001, Yarkas and Azizi agreed to host a meeting in the Tarragona region of Spain for Mohammed Atta and other key al-Qaeda strategists planning the 9/11 attack. That month, Atta arrived from Florida and met with Yarkas, Ramzi Binalshibh, and others, including possibly Mamoun Darkazanli, another Syrian living in Germany who is accused of creating the Hamburg cell.

Atta was apparently given his last instructions before 9/11. Meanwhile, another member of the Spanish al-Qaeda cell had flown to New York and dutifully videotaped the Twin Towers and other New York landmarks.

During that same month, Spanish police raided the apartment of Jamal Zougam, a Morroccan who ran a small cell phone store. Asked by the French police to check out Zougam because of his relationship to a French terrorist, the Spanish police found Yarkas' phone number among his belongings.

In the aftermath of 9/11, in November of 2001, the Spanish police swept down on the al-Qaeda cell in Spain, arresting Yarkas and sixty-two others. Azizi managed to slip through their fingers. And Zougam was considered too obscure to arrest. Among the phone numbers found among Yarkas' belongings are those of Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell.

Scotland Yard's Assistant commissioner David Veness: "What is different about this form of terrorism is the unequivocal intention to cause mass murder by means of terrorism that are delivered without warning in any form to the public."

A New Terrorist Cell
Just as the Spanish police are wrapping up one cell, another emerged to take its place. By then, an Egyptian by the name of Rabei Osman el-Sayed Ahmed had arrived in Madrid from Germany. He and a group of North Africans, including Jamal Zougam and Amer al-Azizi, and a Tunisian also was connected to Yarkas, Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, began to plot another an attack- this time aimed at the Spanish. (read more about Rabei Ahmed)

In late 2003, researchers at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) discovered an analytical document on a jihadist website dealing with the war in Iraq and the European countries who backed the US in the conflict. A number of pages dealt with the subject of Spain, suggesting it would be a weak link among European supporters, because its population was overwhelmingly opposed to the war. To this day, speculation rests on the belief that the Madrid attackers were motivated by this document.

The Attack
The terrorists bought dynamite called Goma 2 stolen from a mine in Northern Spain. They loaded it into thirteen satchels, weighing 10 kilograms apiece, and attached cell phones to act as timers. On the morning of March 11, the satchels were placed on four trains that were converging on the huge Atocha train station in downtown Madrid.

Visit the CBC.ca PHOTO GALLERY: Scenes of the wreckage

Denise Gilroy was on one of the trains when the bomb exploded. "I think for a few minutes I may not have been conscious of what was really going on. And then, I turned over and I saw a man crawling along the aisle. And all I could see around me were bodies."

Between 7:36 and 7:39 on that morning the bombs exploded. In total, 191 people died and 1,400 were injured. The day quickly became known in Spain as 3/11. As it turned out, only ten of the bags exploded, detonated by signals from cell phones, and only one of the trains had actually arrived in the crowded station.

The Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar of the Popular Party was quick to place the blame for the blast on the Basque separatist group ETA. This would prove a fateful decision, costing him the election that was slated for March 14.

Indeed, a videotape found near a mosque on the outskirts of Madrid showed a man, speaking Arabic with a Moroccan accent, claiming responsibility for the massacre.

He said he was the military leader of al-Qaeda in Europe, that he belonged to a group called Ansar al-Qaeda, a group unknown to police. The reason given for the attack at Atocha station in Madrid was Spain's participation in the Iraq war.

In the days immediately following the attacks, millions of Spaniards marched through the streets to protests the attacks at Atocha station.

Visit the CBC.ca PHOTO GALLERY: Bombing protest

On March 14th, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his Socialist party, pledging to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in a national election.

Madrid security expert Charles Powell: "(The bombing) tells us that it's a much more formidable enemy than we had originally realized and that they see themselves as being involved in a long-term campaign."

The Arrests Begin
The police were able to close in on the group they believed carried out the murders. Jamal Zougam was one of the first arrested because the cell phones in the unexploded bags were tracked to his shop. The police also found a lead to a ramshackle farmhouse in Morta de Yajuna, thirty kilometers southwest of Madrid, where the bombs were constructed. It was rented by Jamal Ahmidan who ran a clothing store in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapies. He allegedly bought 110 kilograms of dynamite from a Spaniard, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a former coal miner from Aviles in northern Spain. Trashorras was put in custody and accused of stealing industrial dynamite from the mine in the last week of February 2004.

Eighteen men, mostly Moroccans, are in custody for the bombings. Six have been charged with mass murder and the rest with collaborating or belonging to a terrorist organization. Rabei was living in Italy at the time of the attacks, but was arrested on June 7th when wiretaps revealed his role. The men being held for the attacks of March 11 are a mix of educated, middle-class and ideologically radical Muslims and drug dealers and petty criminals. Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet had lived in Spain for eight years, studied economics and worked as a real estate agent. His right hand man, Jamal Ahmidan is a Moroccan drug dealer who traveled on a fake Belgian passport.

On April 3, 2004 seven bomb conspirators were cornered by police for three hours. Rather than surrender, they blew themselves up.

Plans for Further Attacks
On April 3, 2004, Spanish police approached an apartment building in a working class neighborhood of Madrid called Leganes. The police surrounded a first-floor apartment and placed it under siege, before an explosive blast killed seven people inside the flat, along with a Spanish Special Forces police officer.

The men killed in the blast had rented the apartment just after the March 11 attacks. Prior to killing themselves, these suspects made many phone calls and chanted Koranic verses.

In early April 2004, a partially constructed bomb was found on railway tracks on the high-speed rail link between Madrid and Seville.

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