NewsMax.com Wires
Monday, April 5, 2004

Court officials said two additional suspects were arrested Saturday in a Madrid suburb and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast in connection with the commuter train attacks in which 191 people were killed.

There were no details as to their identities or what role they may have played in the attacks.

Authorities hunted for suspects still at large while forensic scientists worked to identify more of the terrorists who blew themselves up over the weekend as police moved in to arrest them.

Interior Minister Angel Acebes confirmed that at least three leading suspects in the bombings - Tunisian Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, Jamal Ahmidan and Moroccan Abdennabi Kounjaa - were killed in the blast.

Police were trying to see if any of three other top suspects, for whom international arrest warrants were issued last week, were among the two other terror suspects killed in the explosion in Leganes south of Madrid Saturday night.

News reports said the identification process was proving difficult because some of the bodies were severely mutilated.

The ministry late Sunday issued the names of three new suspects in the Madrid bombings, which also injured more than 1,800 people.

Also Monday, the conservative newspaper ABC said that just hours before the terrorists killed themselves in Leganes, it received a fax from the same group that had claimed blame for the March 11 bombings. This time, it warned it would turn Spain "into an inferno" unless the country halted its support for the United States and withdrew its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ABC said.

ABC said the letter was handwritten in Arabic and signed "Abu Dujana Al Afgani, Ansar Group, al-Qaida in Europe."

Time for Another Cave-in to Terrorists?

In a videotape found outside a Madrid mosque two days after the March 11 attacks, an Arabic-speaking man read a statement signed by Al Afgani claiming blame for the March 11 bombings.

The ABC letter said Spain had until April 4 to end its support for the United States and withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If these demands are not met, we will declare war on you and ... convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like rivers," the letter said.

The group said it had showed its force with the "blessed attacks of March 11" and the planting of a bomb along the high-speed railway line linking Madrid and Seville last week, which did not explode.

The Interior Ministry said officials "attach a certain credibility to the authorship, but not to the threat" contained in the letter.

ABC quoted unidentified sources in Spain's National Intelligence Center as saying the letter's authenticity appeared "fairly credible." It said the language used in the letter was similar to that used in the video.

The newspaper's wording Ansar Group apparently refers to Ansar al-Islam is an Islamic extremist guerrilla group blamed for terrorist strikes in Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Morocco.

The Spanish intelligence agency has linked the Ansar group to the Tunisian ringleader killed in the blast Saturday evening, ABC said.

French private investigator Jean-Charles Brisard said Spanish police believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terror suspect with links to Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaida, was behind the Madrid attacks.

The bombings came three days before Spain's general elections. Many saw the attacks as a reprisal for the government's support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The opposition Socialist party, which had opposed the war along with most Spaniards, won the elections.

The party said it planned to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by June 30 unless the United Nations took control of the situation. The party later said it intended to double its troop numbers in Afghanistan to 250 to show it was committed to fighting terrorism.

Acebes said police found 22 pounds of dynamite and 200 detonators explosives in the building where the five killed themselves, indicating they were plotting more violence. It also linked them to the failed high-speed rail line attack Friday.

"The core of the group that carried out the [March 11] attacks is either arrested or dead in yesterday's collective suicide, including the head of the operative commando unit," Acebes said.

Fifteen suspects are already in custody in the Madrid attacks. Six have been charged with mass murder and nine with collaborating with or belonging to a terrorist organization. Eleven of the 15 charged are Moroccan.

"They were going to keep on attacking because some of the explosives were prepared, packed and connected to detonators," he said.

The investigation has focused on Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which has links to al-Qaida and is related to a group suspected in last year's Casablanca bombings, which killed 45 people including 12 suicide bombers.

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