MYSTERY
The Madrid Train Bombings and the Battle Over Who Did It
At the height of the morning rush on Thursday, March 11, 2004, ten bombs hidden in sports bags exploded within a few minutes of each other on four packed commuter trains converging on Madrid's Atocha station. One hundred and ninety-three people were killed and around two thousand injured — the deadliest terrorist attack in Spanish history and, at the time, in the history of post-war Europe. The bombs were crude and devastating: military plastic explosive packed with nails and screws, triggered by the alarms of cheap mobile phones. The attack fell three days before a general election that the governing conservative Partido Popular had expected to win, and from the first hours its government insisted, repeatedly and emphatically, that the perpetrator was ETA, the Basque separatist group it had spent years promising to defeat. The evidence pointed elsewhere almost at once — to an unexploded bag with a phone detonator, to a van near the departure station holding detonators and a cassette of Quranic verses, to a local cell of Islamist radicals enraged by Spain's participation in the war in Iraq. Over a frantic weekend the public came to believe it was being misled, gathered in spontaneous protests outside the ruling party's headquarters, and on March 14 voted the government out. Three years later, after the longest trial in modern Spanish history, the courts established the truth in detail: a jihadist cell, inspired by al-Qaeda, had carried out the massacre, and ETA had had nothing to do with it. And yet the case never closed in the public mind. A determined campaign — by newspapers, broadcasters, and politicians of the defeated right — kept alive the claim that the official account was a cover-up and that the real authors of 11-M had been hidden, for years after the verdict and, in corners of Spanish life, to this day. This article sets out what happened, what the courts proved, what genuinely remains murky, and how a fully solved crime became one of the most contested events in modern European politics.
