- Discrepancies started to emerge as members of the Spanish
parliament probing the aftermath of the March 11 rail bombings quizzed
police on duty on the day of Spain's worst ever terror attack.
-
- Police chief inspector Luis Martin Gomez told the enquiry
how he had examined a van understood to have been used by the bombers in
the town of Alcala de Henares, the small town east of Madrid from where
they set off with their deadly cargo.
-
- Gomez said he saw nothing suspicious in the seized vehicle,
which he looked over only briefly "for two or three seconds"
before it was transported to Madrid for further investigations.
-
- A later search uncovered detonators and a tape containing
Koranic verses.
-
- Gomez then described earlier intelligence service claims
that the detonators had been left clearly in view as if to call deliberate
attention to them as "utterly false".
-
- The question of at what point evidence of likely involvement
by Islamic extremists in the attacks which killed nearly 200 people and
injured some 2,000 is a significant part of the political debate.
-
- The ousted rightwing Popular Party (PP) government, which
lost a general election three days after the bombings, initially insisted
ETA was behind the attacks -- but the discovery of the detonators of a
kind not used by the Basque extremist group. The tape also forced a belated
rethink.
-
- Madrid's former head of security, Santiago Cuadro meanwhile
contradicted evidence given last week by his then superiors, insisting
he had never said the explosives used were of a type ETA used in the past.
-
- Cuadro said he had merely told former police deputy director
Pedro Diaz-Pintado just hours after the blasts that there were "indications"
to that effect.
-
- He added he was "sure to have spoken of dynamite"
and not Titadyne, used in past ETA attacks.
-
- But Diaz-Pintado had told the hearing he remembered Cuadro
spoke specifically of "Titadyne with a detonator cord."
-
- It was early on March 12 that the explosive was revealed
as Goma-2 Eco.
-
- Members of the inquiry said Wednesday it was possible
that either a poor quality telephone line or the great stress officials
faced led to the confusion.
-
- Further uncertainty surrounds the caretaker of a building
opposite where the van was parked. He told officials he saw police discover
the van's contents.
-
- A supposedly secret intelligence report backs that contention
that the police checked over the vehicle on the spot.
-
- But some police officers say the van was only searched
in the late afternoon of March 11 after being taken to police headquarters
in the capital.
-
- Away from the inquiry itself, former Spanish prime minister
Felipe Gonzalez, who warned of a possible new attack, blasted senior PP
figures, in particular leader Mariano Rajoy and former interior minister
Angel Acebes, for insisting that ETA was to blame.
-
- "The only thing which is clear is that you were
the ones who told the truth about what happened," Gonzalez told Cadena
Ser radio with heavy sarcasm.
-
- "The proof of that is that all those processed and
detained are from ETA," Gonzalez continued.
-
- In fact, most of the 18 people currently held in connection
with the March 11 massacre are Moroccan.
-
- Gonzalez added that the US-led war on terror, insofar
as it had spawned the Iraq war, was a huge mistake.
-
- "If the idea was to stop terrorism in its tracks
then the strategy was erroneous -- the threat of international terror has
risen. It (the war) was not just a mistake but a piece of great stupidity,"
Gonzalez said.
-
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