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According to this version, the police reviewed the list of calls from a suspect phone belonging to the terrorist cell. By calling one of the numbers on that list, the police made contact with a property owner who claimed to have rented an apartment in Leganés to a group of Arabs about a month prior. That is the version of the apartment’s discovery mentioned in the verdict, in which the story of the chase is totally ignored.
The police then surrounded the apartment on the afternoon of April 3. Around 9 PM, the GEO began the assault in a hasty manner, according to members of that group [17]. But before gaining entrance, the apartment blew up, killing its 7 occupants and a GEO member. Due to the condition of the bodies, it was necessary to use fingerprints or DNA during the identification process. The investigation concluded that it was a group suicide, but the suicidal nature of the explosion was not as clearly established as verdict stated.
Before the assault by the GEO and the explosion, neighbors had heard gunshots, shouting and even Arabic chants coming from the apartment. But no one clearly saw the suspects. And there were no fingerprints or any sign of bullet impacts that should exist there after an exchange of gunfire [18]. The decisive argument supporting the theory of suicide is that the suspects allegedly had communicated by telephone with their families during the siege to say goodbye. During the trial, the only family member called as a witness to those phone calls was the brother of one of the 7 suspects, Abdenabi Kounjaa.
This witness testified that he could not recognize the voice of his brother during the call, and that he did not think it was him [19], which is why he immediately alerted the police and did not call back to convince his brother not to commit suicide. That testimony casts serious doubt on the authenticity of the calls, especially if one considers that no other family was summoned to the trial as a witness.
The investigative file contains 3 successive reports on those calls, but provides no further clarification of the matter. Each report contradicts the previous one in various aspects: the phones used, the identity of certain recipients of calls, and the number of calls made to some recipients [20]. So many differences justify doubts about the reliability of such information.
Did the suspects really commit suicide? What circumstances brought about the presence of those individuals in that apartment? By April 3 the media had already been announcing for 4 days that they were being sought and their pictures had already been disclosed. In that context, for all of them to meet in an apartment outside Madrid, instead of escaping each by his own means, was extremely imprudent. And why would these criminals, who had just committed a massive crime, wait for the police to evacuate the entire neighborhood before blowing up their apartment? The inconsistencies do not end there. Anyone interested in the movements of suspects from the time of the attack to the moment of their suicide will learn, for example, that El Chino was partying with his wife’s family 8 days after the attack, in the same house where he allegedly built the bombs. The very profile of most of the members of the cell does not correspond to a radical Islam that allegedly led them to perpetrate the massacre and later to commit suicide. Four of them were petty criminals linked to the world of drug trafficking, a fact not very compatible with Islam.
El Chino lived with a native Spaniard, who wore flimsy clothes, and their son went to Catholic school [21]. The death of the other 7 suspects allowed, in any case, the reconstruction of a scenario without going into too much detail, and without the accused being able to contradict it. Moreover, journalists who have had access to the investigative file [22] have cast doubt on the above connection and between the 7 suicides and Zougam. According to these journalists, there is nothing in the documents provided by the phone company Amena to indicate that the seven SIM cards in question had been put into use at the home of El Chino. The defense brought up that problem during the trial without the Amena employees who had been invited to testify as experts responding to it [23].
The last major element in favor of the Islamist attack theory is the Renault Kangoo van. The verdict stated that several members of the terrorist cell, without specifying exactly who [24], used the van to arrive at the subway with their bombs. Therefore, the court did not take into account the evidence given — during the trial itself — by the dog handler who participated in the inspection of that vehicle.
In effect, although the dog handler recognized the possibility of a small piece of explosive being overlooked, that same expert stated that the handling of bags with dozens of kilograms of explosives would have left a trace of odor inside the vehicle, traces that his dog would have detected [25]. Question from Zougam’s defense attorney: “In the event that the van had been transporting 50 or 30 kilos of explosives, would the dog have detected that smell? — Yes, he would have detected it, he would have immediately, because explosive residues remain and the dog would have detected it.” ( (En el caso de que en esa furgoneta se hubieran transportado 50 o 30 Kilos de explosivo ¿El perro habría detectado ese olor ?- Si lo habría detectado, inmediatamente lo habría, porque quedan residuos del explosivo y el perro lo habría detectado.) Then another lawyer asked whether the dog would have detected the smell if the explosive would have been particularly well packaged. The witness replied that the handling of such a large amount of explosive always leaves a smell.]]. Furthermore, the attendant who brought the Kangoo van to the attention of the police stated that he thought the individuals were Eastern Europeans, and the metro station employee who sold a ticket to one of the individuals claimed he spoke without an accent [26]. Regarding this point, once again the behavior of the suspects is surprising. Why attract attention by turning to the ticket saleswoman with their faces almost masked instead of buying the ticket at a vending machine? Why run the risks of using a stolen vehicle without changing the license plates? And why did the terrorists abandon that vehicle, in particular leaving detonators, explosives and clothing inside it? According to the indictment, that clothing contained DNA samples of suspects, but the verdict did not take into account that evidence.
So many unexplained aspects of the supporting evidence cause the Islamist attack theory to lose all credibility. This is especially so considering that this article does not mention all of them. In his book Les Dessous du Terrorisme [27], Gerhard Wisnewski shows, for example, the inconsistency in the various Islamist claims of responsibility for the attack. In accepting the thesis of Islamist responsibility, the Spanish court concluded to a surprising extent that these contradictions were not significant.
The shadow of the police
Is there other evidence to support the theory of an Islamist attack or to steer the investigation in another direction? The problem is that key elements of the investigation have been neglected in a manner that is, to say the least, disturbing. First, the train cars where the bombs exploded were destroyed just two days after the attack [28].
Why was it necessary to eliminate the “crime scene” so quickly? In 2006, a subway train that had suffered an accident in Valencia was kept for 2 years because of the needs of the investigation. The court acknowledged in its ruling that answers would have been found to address many doubts if the coaches had been preserved for a longer time [29].
The most important of those doubts has to do with the nature of the explosive used. The analysis of the chemicals deposited on the objects located near the explosions would have provided key information for the investigation. However, no one knows yet exactly what it was that exploded on the trains, as was acknowledged in the verdict [30]. We see here why it was not possible to determine the type of explosive used. The first was negligence in selecting the agency that performed the analysis of the samples. The responsibility for that analysis was put into the hands of bomb disposal specialists, whose laboratories have only rudimentary methods for analysis of explosive substances. Under usual procedure, forensic police would have had to ensure the analysis, precisely because they have far more advanced methods.
The results of the forensic analysis were also very imprecise. The report submitted to the investigative judge indicated the presence of “generic components of dynamite” in the samples. But it does not specify the type of dynamite. Was it Titadyne, Goma-2 Eco? Even more surprisingly, it does not even include the list of chemical components found. Faced with so much uncertainty, the court ended up ordering a new expert analysis at the time the trial began in 2007. Unfortunately, the new expert analysis had to use the already analyzed samples, since they could not collect new samples due to the previously mentioned destruction of the trains. The experts complained about the small number of samples kept by police and the contamination of these samples due to serious negligence in the course of the previous analysis [31]. Finally, their findings do not shed more light on the type of explosive used given that those findings include a list of products that do not correspond to the makeup of TNT [32]. At the end of this whole process, there was great interest in the anticipated testimony of the director of the laboratory of bomb deactivation specialists to answer questions about the work she had delivered in March 2004. But she testified that she did not have the chromatography media in which the chemical elements appeared [33], nor did she even have the documents in which they had made notes during the carrying out of their analysis [34]. Nevertheless she shocked the court when she recited for the first time the precise listing of chemical compounds found, explaining that she had never turned over that list because no one had explicitly asked for it [35].
The imprecision of the analysis report had led to such a huge controversy in Spain during the 3 years between the attack and the testimony of the director of the laboratory that her explanation was laughable. What credence can be given to that list, first mentioned after 3 years and which corresponds to the composition of Goma-2 Eco dynamite?
To the question of the explosives must be added the doubts that led to the statements of the chief of the bomb-dismantling specialists who oversaw operations on March 11. Upon seeing the damage the bombs had caused, the chief of the specialists stated that visible tearing of the structures of the train cars was characteristic of high power explosives, of a military type, not of dynamite [36].
It is important to remember that certain military explosives leave no chemical traces at the scene of an explosion, which make them very difficult to detect. Another source of doubt is the location of the bombs as reconstructed in the indictment [37]. According to that document, most of the bags, which contained 10 kilograms of explosives, were not hidden but, for example, had been left between two front seats situated face to face next to a window, or in the baggage area, or beside the trash receptacle, or under a folding seat (which should have closed). Only one bomb was hidden under a non-folding seat.
Why didn’t the terrorists try to better hide the handbags? And how is it possible that such heavy bags, abandoned in such visible places, did not attract the attention of the passengers? To answer these questions, several journalists expressed the hypothesis that the bombs were very much smaller and made not with dynamite but rather with high-powered explosives [38]. The Goma-2 Eco dynamite found in the Kangoo van, in the Vallecas backpack, and in the Leganes apartment does not prove that the same explosive was used to blow up the trains. The suspicions about these facts suggest that these were items intended to divert attention from the crime scene, in other words, away from the trains. A final example of negligence: the recordings of conversations among police patrols would have helped to clarify the issue of the chase that allegedly took place in Leganés. But when the judge asked for these recordings, the police said they had not been preserved [39].
More serious than these acts of negligence is the existence of strong suspicions of falsification of various elements of the investigation. We have already mentioned the Vallecas backpack, the Kangoo van and the goodbye phone calls by the Leganés suicides. But there are other elements whose fabrication is so obvious that not even the verdict took them into account, such as, for example, the telephone conversations of Rabei Osman, an Egyptian who lived in Italy. Italian police recorded and translated his conversations in 2004, and in one of them this individual allegedly takes responsibility for organizing the attacks.
During the trial, new translations requested by the defense showed that the sentences in which Osman takes credit for organizing the attack were simply invented by the Italian translators [40].
The Spanish court was therefore obliged to absolve him of all ties to the attack, after he had been presented as the brains of the Islamist group. The verdict does not name an organizer of the attack, a fact which provoked the indignation of victims’ associations, who filed an appeal.
But the most notorious fabrication of the investigation is a Skoda Fabia car that police found near the Alcala metro station, 20 meters from where the Kangoo van was found. That discovery was made on June 13, 2004, in other words, 3 months after the attacks. This second vehicle allowed the strengthening of the argument that the 7 or 8 terrorists arrived in Alcala by car and it also bore traces of DNA from one of those killed in Leganés. Nevertheless, many observers doubt that a vehicle parked so close to the Kangoo van would have been able to go unnoticed for 3 months, even more so considering that its registration number is not even mentioned in records collected on March 11.
That piece of evidence thus remained in limbo until June 2005 when police delivered the testimony of a Chilean prisoner to the investigative judge. This man claimed to have stolen the Skoda and subsequently to have sold it in October 2003 to one of those killed in Leganés. But this evidence was once again discredited in March 2006, when a journalist from El Mundo revealed the testimony of a security guard in a suburb of Madrid where the Skoda was abandoned in November 2003. According to this new witness, the vehicle was improperly parked for 3 weeks and received numerous parking violations, until it disappeared.
By verifying that testimony through the records of the parking violations, it was discovered that the Skoda had been involved in various crimes such as street robberies. These crimes were committed between September and October 2003, a period during which the car was supposedly in possession of the Chilean. But until then the police, as well as the Chilean, had totally concealed those facts from the investigative judge. When he tried again to examine the South American prisoner, the judge learned that he had been extradited to Chile without anyone having notified him of the fact. To all these contradictions must be added the inconsistency of the behavior of the terrorists. To commit one of the worst attacks that has ever been seen in Europe they were unable to come up with anything better than to use a stolen car, involved in a whole series of crimes, which had been abandoned in the street for a time, which had various parking violations, and on which it did not even occur to them to change the license plates.
The court therefore had no choice but to remove the Skoda from the list of elements of proof in its verdict [41]. Moreover, the DNA found on that likely fabricated evidence raises doubts as to the traces of DNA found on clothing so “conveniently” abandoned by the suspects in this case.
Take, finally, some examples of suspected falsification of testimony. Emilio Trashorras confirmed that police had asked him to invent the episode according to which it was he who provided the explosives to El Chino [42]. This witness thought he would enjoy the status of protected witness and that he would have no more problems with the law.
For his part, the witness Hassan Serroukh told the investigative judge that his statement to police had been falsified. That testimony described Zougam as a religious fanatic, something that Serroukh claims he never said [43].
Acts of negligence and suspected fabrications are among the many suspicious police actions that appear in the investigation which followed the attack. But suspicions are heightened even further upon examining the preparations for the attack as presented in the verdict. Two key players in the attack were informants for the security forces [44]. The first, Zouhier, put the terrorist cell in contact with an explosives trafficker. The investigation revealed that the Civil Guard, which controlled this informant, called him two days before the attack.
The second, Trashorras, is nothing less than the actual explosives trafficker. He had several telephone conversations with his police contact the day before, the day after and two days after having placed the explosives in the hands of El Chino. But that police contact maintains Trashorras told him nothing about that fact. In addition, the mobile phones used in the manufacture of the bombs were unlocked at a location belonging to a policeman of Syrian origin, Maussili Kalaji [48].
All these suspicious behaviors, before and after the attack, linked to the obvious inconsistency of the Islamist theory, suggest that the real culprits were under the protection of the state apparatus. It must be emphasized, however, that only a reopening of the investigation can determine whether those suspicions are founded. By revealing evidence that shatters the official version and absolves the alleged organizers, the trial has done nothing more than confirm the extreme fragility of the theory of an Islamist attack.
In any case, in the political context, the court did not attempt to precisely establish the facts. It had to conclude that José María Aznar’s accusations against ETA were unfounded, as had already been decided by the broadest of juries, the voters. At the same time, the court had to conclude that the accusations by neo-cons against al Qaeda were also unfounded, something which the new government of Jose Luis Zapatero had already decided.
The court determined that the initial evidences had been fabricated to falsely accuse the Basque organization ETA, but declined to go further in terms of the manipulations carried out by certain elements of the police. The court chose, not surprisingly, to content itself with the hypothesis with which it had been presented and which was the only one that could restore social calm: the hypothesis of Islamist responsibility without links to al Qaeda.
Translated from Spanish to English by DAVID BROOKBANK.
Notes
Attached documents
Other related documents
Indictment of March 11, 2004 (Pdf in four parts of about 50 megabytes each)
The 192 editorials that the daily El Mundo devoted to the attack.
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- http://www.infowars.com/more-evidence-madrid-train-bombing-was-a-false-flag-op/
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