Author: Daniel Woolls, Associated
Press Writer
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: July 14, 2004
URL: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040714/ap_on_re_eu/spain_bombings
The Spanish government deliberately
ignored a mosque known for fundamentalist preachings and frequented by
suspects in the Madrid train bombings because the facility was financed
by Saudi Arabia, an academic expert testified Wednesday.
Spanish authorities knew for years
the city's largest mosque, the Islamic Cultural Center, adhered to the
Wahabi fundamentalist movement sponsored by Saudi Arabia, Islam expert
Jesus Nunez told a commission investigating the March 11 bombings.
Authorities did nothing to monitor
the mosque because Saudi Arabia provides Spain with oil, Nunez said.
"Until now the West in general -
and Spain as part of it - closed its eyes to what Wahabism means as a rigorous
doctrine that violates human rights," said Nunez, who runs a Madrid think
tank called the Institute of Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action.
Spanish investigators have said
key suspects in the bombings that killed 190 people prayed at the mosque.
The suspects included Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, an accused ringleader
who blew up himself and six other suspects April 3 as police prepared to
arrest them.
For years, Spanish authorities have
known that Islamic extremists used Spain as a safe haven but did not crack
down on them as long as they kept a low profile, Nunez said.
"There was a certain degree of permissiveness,"
he said.
Because Spanish authorities rounded
up dozens of al-Qaida suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, for which Spain
served as a staging ground, authorities should have known extremists would
strike back, Nunez said.
"From that point on, Spain became
part of the battleground," he said.
Those arrests and Spanish support
for pro-Western governments of Islamic countries, like Algeria, are more
at the root of the March 11 attacks than Spain's support for the Iraq (news
- web sites) war, Nunez said.
His comments came after days of
testimony from police about the early stages of the bombing investigation
and the then-conservative government's insistence that Basque separatists
- not Muslim extremists - were to blame.
Several lawmakers chided the panel
for getting bogged down in details and straying from the broader issue
of whether the attacks might have been averted.
"Not seeing the forest for the trees
- that's the risk we run," Gaspar Llamazares, representing the United Left
Party, told The Associated Press.
Much of the testimony in the panel's
first five days of hearings focused on the first piece of evidence suggesting
an Islamic link - a van containing seven detonators, traces of explosive
and a cassette tape with Quranic verses. It was found near the rail station
from which three of the four bombed trains departed.
Senior police officials testified
that despite the government's initial insistence that the Basque separatist
group ETA was to blame, they were wary of the hypothesis. Officials said
a unit specializing in Islamic terror groups had taken over the probe two
days after the blasts, even as the government continued insisting ETA was
the prime suspect.
The government of then-Prime Minister
Jose Maria Aznar backed the Iraq war despite widespread popular opposition
- sending 1,300 soldiers to Iraq - and feared that word of an Islamic link
would doom it in elections due in three days. It did.
Socialists won the election, and
investigators now blame the bombings on Islamic militants with possible
links to al-Qaida.
Also Wednesday, the senior police
official to whom the government attributed the first report that the explosives
used in the attack were Titadyne - the brand often used by ETA - angrily
denied saying that.
The Socialist Party seized on Santiago
Cuadra's comments Wednesday to repeat charges that from the outset the
government had ample evidence of an Islamic link, lied by blaming ETA and
made Cuadra the fall guy.
