Article 1. Cell phones were vital components in the mass destruction that hit Spain on March 11, 2004, and they were symbolsFROM 9/11 TO 3/11 Cell phones were vital components in the mass destruction that hit Spain on March 11, 2004, and they were symbols, too, of the horror that lingered afterwards. Since 9/11, terrorists have known that the most ordinary things in modern life can be turned to apocalyptic purposes: laptops, commercial airliners …. All that’s required is planning and discipline, secrecy and the will to slaughter innocents. In Madrid, terrorists showed they’d learned those lessons well. They used a very simple delivery system: 13 backpacks and gym bags left lying around in commuter trains as they pulled into three crowded stations. Each held about 25 pounds of high explosive. The detonators were wired to the phones. When they rang, 10 of the bombs went off. Europe suddenly heard the echoes of 9/11, of the terrible confusion and uncertainty about who could be responsible for such an outrage. And those cell phones gave Spanish investigators their first big break in tracking down the killers. On Saturday night, Interior Minister Angel Acebes announced five arrests in the case: three Moroccan Arabs and two Indians. All were linked to the purchase of a cheap Trium phone and a phone card found in one of the bombs that didn’t go off. Then the Interior Ministry announced that a videotape had been found near Madrid’s enormous modern mosque on the outskirts of the city. On the tape, according to the ministry, a man speaking in Arabic with a Moroccan accent said he was the “military” leader of Al Qaeda in Europe and claimed responsibility for the bombing. Do these first arrests and the tape prove Osama bin Laden’s organization was indeed behind the bombings? Spanish investigators remained cautious. On the eve of national elections, they were under pressure to release every scrap of information about the bombings, even if they suspected the terrorists’ trail ultimately led in another direction. What is known beyond doubt is that no coordinated terrorist operation remotely as big as this had ever hit Western Europe before. It was, at the very least, a powerful reminder that atrocities can happen anywhere. As experts looked at the modus operandi, the forensics, the possible political motives, there was only one clear consensus: the worry that Al Qaeda’s global campaign of terror has raised the threshold of horror so high that other groups – who may share all, or some, or none of al Qaeda’s other goals – are embracing its terrorist tradecraft. “Terrorism is a means of communication,” says Richard Evans, of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center, and today any group “has to compete for attention from the world media with Al Qaeda and the jihadist organizations.” Yet without knowing who was behind the mass killings in Madrid, it was hard to get the message, if there had been one to get. The government of Spain thought that most of the evidence pointed toward the Basque separatist movement ETA, which has waged a chronic campaign of terror against Spanish regimes since 1968. If so, ETA killed in one day almost a quarter as many people as it had killed in the previous 36 years. Other experts suspected that Al Qaeda was responsible. A third possibility loomed as even more frightening: some sort of connection between Europe’s national separatists and fanatical followers of Osama bin Laden. According to Roland Jacquard, a French terrorism expert, police raids on ETA safe houses in southern France since 2001 have turned up newspaper clippings with operational details about the bombing campaigns of Al Qaeda and Palestinian groups. ETA also has ties to various of the Irish republican Army’s factions, including the Provisional IRA. Some Irish bombmaking experts were traced to Afghanistan, where they were working with Osama bin Laden before 9/11, according to two US government sources who saw intelligence reports in that connection. Both ETA and the IRA have also developed extensive contacts with the guerrilla and terrorist groups in South America. Part of Al Qaeda’s strategy from the beginning was to sow chaos by making its terrorist tradecraft available to the widest possible audience. “By pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth” was one of the mottoes at the beginning of its training manual. One hope lies, perhaps, in the kind of statement made by the estimated 11 million people who poured into the streets of Spain after the attack. A quarter of the entire population, they marched to show they were not afraid, and would never accept the terror directed against them, whoever and whatever was behind it. (From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)
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