Quote:Tense Spain waits for justiceMe pregunto a mí mimmo: lo que he enfatizado con negrita, ¿significa que el sumario completo ya está accesible en algún lugar?
ELIZABETH CARR-ELLIS IN MADRID
DRESSED in a black jacket and jeans, the young Moroccan leans back gently in his chair. "No quiero contestar," the court hears. "I don't want to answer."
When Youssef Belhadj does answer, it is to deny everything. No, he did not know any of the 28 men accused along with him. No, he had no links with al-Qaeda. No, he was not involved in the worst act of Islamic terrorism seen in Europe.
Behind Belhadj sit his 28 co-accused, with 18 protected in a bulletproof glass chamber and the rest, free on bail, in the main section of the courtroom.
Nearby are the friends and families of the 191 people killed when Islamic fundamentalists attacked the Spanish capital of Madrid on March 11, 2004.
Spain has waited three years for this trial - the largest of its kind ever held in Europe - since a series of explosions rocked the capital and blew the country apart.
Outside the makeshift courtroom in Casa del Campo, in the north-west of the city - chosen because the National Court, which usually handles terrorism cases, was too small - security is at an all-time high.
"You wouldn't believe how much surveillance there is that you can't see," said a court official.
And it is not only in the capital. The government has increased its security level and there are extra guards at all areas considered to be at risk: shopping centres, airports, railway stations, power plants, even the country's water supplies.
Events in court are being broadcast live on TV and the internet. More than 600 witnesses will be called, with 100 expert witnesses also speaking, while the evidence runs to 100,000 pages - all digitised and available at the click of a mouse.
The bombings started during punto hora (rush hour) that spring morning three years ago. At just after 7am, four trains left the historic town of Alcalá de Henares headed for Madrid, 19 miles away. The first explosion occurred at 7.37am, just as the train pulled into Atocha, the city's main railway station. Seconds later, four bombs exploded on the second train, as it pulled into the same station. By 7.39am, two more trains, one in El Pozo and one in Santa Engracia, in the south of the city, had been similarly attacked.
In addition to the 191 killed, more than 1,800 people were wounded. It was the worst terror attack in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.
At first, the government of José María Aznar tried to blame the attacks on the Basque separatist group ETA. But within hours the focus was being drawn towards Spain's involvement with the war in Iraq.
Just three days later, Aznar was out of office, replaced in a general election by the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who quickly followed through on his election pledge to bring Spanish troops home from Iraq.
Following a two-year investigation, Juan del Olmo, the examining magistrate, attributed the attacks to an al-Qaeda-inspired cell known as the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group (GICM). No link between the alleged attackers and Osama bin Laden's terrorists has been found.
The three men accused of masterminding the attacks - Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, Hassan el Haski and Belhadj - have all denied any involvement with the attacks.
"I never had any relation to the events which occurred in Madrid," said Sayed, on Thursday, while el Haski argued no true Muslim would condone such events.
All three men refused to answer questions from the prosecution, as is their right under Spanish law, answering their own lawyers in Arabic.
Six of the men are charged with 191 murders and 1,755 attempted murders, for which prosecution lawyers have asked for sentences of just under 40,000 years, although the maximum penalty in Spain is 40 years.
One man, a Spaniard believed to have supplied the explosives, is also accused of one more murder - that of the policeman killed when seven key suspects committed suicide in a raid on a flat in the Leganes area of the capital three weeks after the attack. It was during this raid that Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the Tunisian believed to have been the bombers' ringleader, died.
The remaining suspects face charges including belonging to a terrorist group and handling explosives. Lawyers have said they will deny the accusations.
The only suspect to answer prosecutors' questions so far is Jamal Zougam, the owner of a mobile phone shop in Madrid, said to be where the terrorists bought the devices used in the attack.
Moroccan-born Zougam, 33, who is accused of being one of the bombers, refused to reply to questions about the discovery that seven of the sim cards used in the attack came from his shop in the Lavapiés district of Madrid, along with a card found intact in an unexploded bomb on the El Pozo train. He would only say that he had no control over who bought the cards that were sold in his shop.
The accusation against him centres on the testimony of witnesses who claim to have seen him on the El Pozo and Santa Engracia trains, including one who says Zougam left a rucksack on the lower floor of one of the double-decker trains.
However, Zougam, who laughed out loud at some of the prosecutors' questions, earning him a rebuke from the judge, denied the claim. "I was sleeping. If I'm sleeping I couldn't go to Alcalá," he said.
Earlier, Belhadj, 30, answering his counsel's questions, denied he was the "hooded man" seen in a videotape discovered two days after the attacks claiming responsibility in the name of al-Qaeda and claiming the bombings had been in response to Spain's involvement in the war on terror.
He added that family members who had linked him to bin Laden's terror group did so out of intimidation by the police. "They were insulted and threatened that they would be taken back to Morocco," he said. "If I were in their shoes... I would have said things like that."
Questioning also turned to the conspiracy theory of a link between Islamic terrorists and ETA, a line angrily dismissed by el Haski. "How can I have had contacts with ETA when I cannot even speak Spanish?" he asked.
The hearings are expected to last until July, when the three judges - jury trials are not held in Spanish terrorism cases - will retire to consider the evidence. They are expected to deliver a verdict in October.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=262922007
| Messages In This Thread |