Overview
At the height of the morning rush on 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded on four commuter trains converging on Madrid's Atocha station. One hundred and ninety-one people were killed and more than 1,800 injured. It remains the deadliest attack in modern Spanish history.
Spain was three days from a general election.
Three Days
Within hours, Interior Minister Ángel Acebes told the country there was "no doubt" that ETA, the Basque separatist organisation, was responsible. The government repeated the attribution through diplomatic channels, pressing for a United Nations Security Council statement naming ETA, and held to it publicly for three days.
The police investigation was moving in another direction almost immediately. A van near the Alcalá de Henares station yielded detonators and a cassette of Qur'anic recitation. An unexploded device recovered from one train contained a mobile phone whose SIM card led investigators to a shop in Lavapiés. By 13 March, arrests had been made and the government was acknowledging an Islamist line of inquiry alongside the one it was still asserting.
Voters went to the polls on 14 March. The governing Partido Popular, which had led in polling, lost to the Socialists.
The Theory
Two mirror-image theories grew out of those three days, and both are still in circulation in Spain.
The first holds that the Aznar government knew early that the attack was not ETA's work and maintained the attribution anyway, because ETA's guilt would have read as the death spasm of a group its own security policy had cornered, while an Islamist attack would have read as the price of Spanish participation in the Iraq war — a deployment that had been deeply unpopular and had not been approved by parliament.
The second, advanced principally by the newspaper El Mundo and by figures in the defeated party, runs the other way: that the Islamist attribution was itself incomplete, that ETA or elements of the Spanish security services had a hand in the plot, and that the investigation was steered toward a conclusion convenient to the incoming government. This version leans on discrepancies in the forensic record, particularly over the explosive used and the handling of the recovered detonators.
The Court
The Audiencia Nacional heard the case in 2007. On 31 October it convicted 21 of 28 defendants on charges ranging from forgery to murder. Jamal Zougam, placed at the scene by witnesses and linked through the phone shop, received a sentence exceeding 40,000 years. José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, the former miner who supplied the explosives, received more than 34,700 years. Seven defendants were acquitted, including the man prosecutors had described as the intellectual author of the plot.
The court found no evidence connecting ETA to the bombing. It also declined to endorse the wider version of events pressed by the prosecution in some particulars, acquitting where it found the chain of proof incomplete — a pattern its defenders read as judicial care and its critics read as an investigation that never fully closed.
What It Established
The documented fact is narrow and not seriously contested: for three days a government asserted an attribution its own investigators were already abandoning, in the week of an election it then lost. What is contested is why — whether it was a political calculation, or an administration that had spent decades with ETA as the answer and was slow to reach for another one.
The judicial record answers the question of who placed the bombs. It has not settled, in Spanish public argument, the question of what the government believed while it was still saying otherwise.