Madrid death toll hits 198
2004-03-12 10:28
Madrid - The death toll has risen to 198 in the Spanish terrorist attacks, news reports said on Friday.
Deputy Justice Minister Rafael Alcala told reporters at an improvised morgue that 84 bodies remain to be identified, the news agency Efe said.
State-run Spanish television also put the toll at 198, up from 192, with more than 1 400 injured.
A total of 367 people were still in hospital on Friday, 45 of them of them in critical condition, the TV report said.
Meanwhile, Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio told French radio on Friday that "everything appears to indicate" that the Basque separatist group ETA was behind the blasts on rush-hour commuter trains in Madrid that killed 198 people.
Spanish officials immediately blamed ETA after the attacks took place but adopted a more cautious approach later saying they were not ruling out that it may be the work of extremists linked to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.
"Everything appears to indicate that this terrible carnage is the work of ETA," said the minister in the interview to Europe 1 private radio.
Strong precedents
"We have very strong clues, very strong precedents," she said.
She did not, however, completely rule out the possibility that Islamic radicals were behind the attack, saying "this is a hypothesis that the government is examining".
But "we can't speculate," she added.
The 10 bomb blasts that ripped through four trains and three railway stations in the southeast of the capital during morning rush-hour, made it the worst attack in Europe since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people. - AP/AFP
- News24