Spain: Shopping centre targeted

2004-04-08 15:21

Daniel Woolls

Madrid - Terrorists who blew themselves up in a flat last weekend as police moved in to arrest them over the March 11 bombings, had been plotting an attack on a large shopping centre outside Madrid, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Police combing through the flat found evidence that included maps of Parquesur, a retail and leisure complex, El Mundo said, quoting police.

The police also found at least two backpacks and a belt, all packed with dynamite and wired to detonators, the paper said.

Interior ministry officials were not available to comment on the report.

El Mundo said the attack was to have been staged on Sunday - the day after the police raid that prompted up to seven terrorists to take their own lives - or during the week before Easter, when millions of Spaniards are on vacation and schools are out, making the crowds that normally pack Parquesur even larger.

The facility has 193 stores, a hotel and a 2 500-seat multi-cinema.

Tip-off

Another newspaper, El Pais, said four days before the March 11 attacks, police acting on a tip-off from neighbours visited the rural house 30km southeast of Madrid where officials say the bombs used in the railway attacks were assembled.

But police did not go into the house because they lacked a court order, and instead just jotted down the license plate numbers of cars parked outside, the paper said.

Neighbours had called the police because a heavily overloaded car arrived at the house and they thought it might be carrying drugs or stolen goods, El Pais said.

On Wednesday, National Court Judge Juan del Olmo jailed two more Moroccan suspects on terrorism charges in relation to the March attacks, a court official said.

Seventeen people are now charged in the case - six with mass murder and the rest with collaborating or belonging to a terrorist group. Thirteen of the total are Moroccan.

The attacks on four commuter trains left 191 people dead and more than 1 800 injured.

Seven dead in flat blast

The court official said police now believe a total of seven may have died in the Leganes blast, in which a special operations officer also died.

The government says the Tunisian ringleader of the rail attacks, his Moroccan right-hand man and another prime suspect were among those killed.

Key suspects still at large include Amer Azizi, a Moroccan charged with terrorism in the indictment handed by Judge Baltasar Garzon last September against members of an alleged Spain-based al-Qaeda cell that he says helped prepare the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Garzon describes Azizi as the right-hand man of reputed cell leader Imad Yarkis in their campaign to recruit young Muslim men and sent them to training camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Indonesia.

The investigation into the Madrid attacks has focused on the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which has links to al-Qaeda. It is also related to a group suspected in suicide bombings last year in Casablanca, Morocco, that killed 33 people.

Special Easter security measures

Fearing more attacks, the government ordered unprecedented security measures for Easter week, when millions of vacationing Spaniards pack trains, planes and highways.

A bomb was found and dismantled last Friday on a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville.

A statement sent from a group linked to al-Qaeda - and which claimed responsibility for the March 11 attacks two days later - to a Spanish newspaper said the bomb was placed as a warning of the havoc the group could wreak.

The group said it would turn Spain into "an inferno" unless Madrid withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spain has 1 300 soldiers in Iraq and 125 in Afghanistan.

- SAPA