This judicial week began with the much awaited testimony of three ETA terrorists. Called to the stand by the lawyer of Jamal Zougam (one of the main defendants), the Basque militants were admitted by the judge in accordance with the rights of the defence. Yet Spanish police have never found any evidence linking the Madrid bombings to ETA, a fact further reinforced by Monday's testimonies.
The first came from Irkus Badillo and Gorka Vidal, two ETA separatists known to as members of the notorious "caravan of the death". The pair were arrested on 28 February, 2004 (eleven days before the Madrid bombings) when travelling to Madrid in a van loaded with explosives. According to the defendant Emilio Suárez Trashorras, the two Basques were friends of Jamal Ahmidan, "the Chinese". Both witnesses brushed aside such suggestions, declaring sometimes between laughter that they knew nobody involved in the attacks and had no knowledge of the attacks. Vidal drove the point home: "I have nothing to do with 11-M, and nothing to do with Islamists. I don't have to be here".
Luisa Barrenechea is a lawyer and researcher of European counter-terrorism at FRIDE in Madrid.Badillo and Vidal were followed by Henri Parot, an ETA terrorist guilty of twenty-six murders. Parot was brought to testify because his name and address (along with those of three other Basque militants) appeared on a note in the possession Abdelkrim Bensmail (a jailed member of the Algerian terrorist organisation the Armed Islamic Group who also testified this week). Parot claimed to have no idea why Bensmail would have his details, also insisting that he had never met the Algerian and that ETA had nothing to do with the 11-M attacks. The ETA witnesses were taken aback on numerous occasions by surprising questions: could they speak Arabic? Had they been in Iraq? Had they trained in Lebanon with Hizbullah? But despite their separate origins, ideologies and motivations, both the accused and the witnesses spoke the same language of terror.
Read her previous reports from the trial proceedings on 30 March, 13 April and 20 April.Numerous police officers related to the investigation testified this week, including the officer that recognised the existence of a "ghost" report that erroneously linked ETA to the attacks, and a member of the Guardia Civil who fined Jamal Ahmidan for speeding when the terrorist was driving from Asturias with a car loaded with explosives. However, most of the police testimonies overlapped and did little to contribute novel information to the proceedings.
Other witnesses included relatives of the wife of "Chinese" and the friends of a number of the defendants. One of the latter, a friend of Serhane Ben Adelmajih (who blew himself up in the Leganés blast), declared that days after the attacks, Adelmajih told him that he was going to return to Tunisia. This week also saw a detailed declaration from an expert commissioner of the forensic police.
It specified how the forensic experts worked in the wreckage of the trains, what substances they found, and finally how physical remnants of the terrorists were not found in the massacre. In a personal aside, the officer noted how he did not return to his house for a week, giving a sense of the major and methodical undertaking made by the security forces in the wake of the attacks and of the complexity of the investigations that culminated in seating 29 defendants in court.
The trial has so far successfully employed the necessary technology and means, and enjoyed the total support of other European countries in its execution – Belgian authorities smoothly facilitated via videoconference the testimony of Mourad Chabarou, a man imprisoned in a Belgian jail who is a member of the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group (GICM) and a relative of Rabei Osman, "the Egyptian", considered to be the ideologue behind the 11-M attack. This witness managed, for the first time, to ruffle Rabei Osman; the defendant gesticulated nervously while Mourad Chabarou explained Rabei Osman's use of Koranic tapes for the indoctrination of others, or how Osman told him that Serhane Ben Adelmajih was dead, without specifying that Adelmajih had killed himself in Leganés, adding "God compensates him with the Paradise".
Sometimes the trial is surprising, passing in a matter of moments from testimonies of terrorists to those of professional police, anonymous citizens, victims whose lives were changed by the attack, and of relatives and friends of the terrorists who some support without understanding. After two months of the trial, all that has been discussed has become so familiar and has assumed a measure of normality, that sometimes it is possible to think that, in this room of the Audiencia Nacional, reality surpasses fiction.
