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March 13, 2004, Scotsman MADRID MASSACRE: ETA IS PRIME SUSPECT, YET STILL THE FINGER POINTS AT AL -QAEDA Gethin Chamberlain Diplomatic Correspondent ON THURSDAY afternoon, a few hours after the bombs went off in Madrid, Ana Palacio, the foreign minister, was telling friends that she and the rest of the Spanish government were convinced that the attacks were the work of the Basque terrorist group ETA. Spanish police had already thwarted similar attempts, ETA had been threatening to disrupt the election process with a spectacular attack and initial tests on the explosives used showed them to be of a type favoured by that terrorist organisation: the conclusion was obvious. By the early evening, however, that certainty was fading after the discovery of seven detonators in a van, which also contained a tape of Koranic verses spoken in Arabic. A claim from a group using the name of al-Qaeda further muddied the waters. Now, as the Spanish interior minister, Angel Acebes, admitted, it was impossible to know what to think. By yesterday evening, the picture was, if anything, less clear. All Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, could say was that the guilty would be brought to justice and no line of inquiry would be ruled out. The investigation, he insisted, would soon bear fruit. With ETA denying the attack, investigators had their work cut out. Within hours of the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade's e-mail to the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, doubts were being cast on its authenticity. The group had previously claimed responsibility for incidents in which there was no terrorist involvement, including the power cuts on the North American seaboard and last year's London blackout. "The claim doesn't have much weight. It doesn't prove anything," one US official said. But no-one seemed confident enough to dismiss it out of hand. Earlier this month, the group put out a statement, again apparently on behalf of al-Qaeda, denying responsibility for the bombings in Baghdad and Karbala which claimed at least 271 lives. The statement, which also spoke in favour of civil war in Iraq and warned of an increase in attacks on coalition forces in Iraq in June, was sent to the al -Quds al-Arabi newspaper, just as it was on Thursday, though observers noted that it was unusual for al-Qaeda to deny an attack. In August last year, it claimed responsibility for the attack on the UN headquarters in Iraq and the bombing of a Jakarta hotel that killed 12 people and wounded 150, though that was almost certainly the work of the Jemaah Islamiyah group. In November, it claimed responsibility for the attack which killed the British consul in Istanbul, Roger Short, and warned Britons to expect "death to their sons." It was one of three groups or individuals to claim responsibility for the attacks, and it had already claimed responsibility for the bombing of two synagogues in Istanbul, claiming that Israeli intelligence agents were inside. The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade takes its name from a pseudonym for Mohammed Atef, who was killed in a US missile strike in November 2001 south of Kabul. Atef was a member of the group responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, in 1981, and he was also involved in the attack which killed 58 western tourists at Luxor in Egypt in 1997. Atef's 14-year-old daughter had married Osama bin Laden's son, Abdullah, in January 2001, and footage of bin Laden reciting a poem at the wedding has appeared on Arabic television. To complicate matters further, while al-Qaeda has no track record of claiming responsibility for attacks, preferring to offer praise or encouragement to others, ETA does. Then there is the physical evidence. The compacted dynamite used in the attacks is of a sort used by ETA. The detonators were not. No-one wanted to call it the wrong way: "We're assuming a greater probability that ETA was responsible," said one German source. "But you can't rule out that it may have been an Islamic group." In the absence of hard facts, some looked for scapegoats. Inocencio Arias, Spain's UN ambassador and the chairman of the Security Council's counter -terrorism committee, accused "many countries of lagging behind in their fight against terrorism." Mr Arias said he believed Thursday's attacks carried ETA's fingerprints, but he was not certain. "I would say it's ETA, but I cannot be sure," he said. The problem with al-Qaeda is that it is such a disparate organisation, more an idea than a physical force. From Bali to Kenya to the United States, its reach encompasses countless small groups who share similar militant Islamic aims. Some experts suggest that some of the groups at its fringes, such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), might be prepared to co-operate with non -Islamic terrorists. The GIA is thought to have had links with ETA. Maybe they pooled their resources and their expertise to produce an attack which is characteristic of neither strand of terrorism. Maybe, as other experts say, they do not co-operate, in which case it was ETA or al-Qaeda alone. Or neither. No-one knows. Yesterday afternoon, Ms Palacio re-stated the Spanish government's stance, saying: "Everything appears to indicate that this terrible carnage is the work of ETA." However, nothing was being ruled out.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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