In its seventh week, the 11-M trial continued with the testimony of numerous witnesses whose contributions seek to clarify how Madrid was turned three years ago into the city of the "trains of death".
This week's witnesses included an informer for the Guardia Civil, who testified about the trafficking of explosives, and a number of testimonies related to the use of telephone cards in plotting the attack, the rental of the flat in Leganés where the ringleaders of the attack blew themselves up on 3 April, 2004, and to the property at Moreta de Tajuña, where the bombing was planned.
Luisa Barrenechea is a lawyer and researcher of European counter-terrorism at FRIDE in Madrid. This is the first installment of her weekly coverage of the trial for toD. Further testimony came from miners, from members of the state security forces, and the girlfriend of Rafá Zouhier (an informer for the Guardia Civil for whom the prosecutors have demanded a 20-year prison sentence for abetting the bombers' acquisition of explosives). The attention of prosecutors has focused this week on clarifying how the explosives used were procured by the attackers. Witnesses confirmed the lax nature of security at the Conchita Mine in the Asturias from where the explosives are thought to have been stolen and how two of the suspects on trial – Emilio Suárez Trashorras and Antonio Toro – were able to transport large amounts of explosives from the mine with total impunity. The explosive traffickers' culpability and involvement in the preparation of the attack is becoming increasingly clear.
The week's most tense moment came when the ex-Director General of the police, AgustÃn DÃaz de Mera, refused to reveal the source of a secret report that suggested relations existed between the Islamist terrorists and the Basque terrorist group ETA. On Monday, for the third time the presiding judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez expelled Zouhier for gesticulating during the confession of his girlfriend as she claimed that he knew several of the other implicated suspects, including Jamal Ahmidan, the "Chinese", one of the attack's main plotters who died in the Leganés blast.
To complement her testimony, the witness gave the court one of Zouhier's letters (displayed above), in which he depicts a plane striking the World Trade Centre next to the face of Osama bin Laden and a poem praising the notorious terrorist. The letter, crudely drawn and infantile in nature, would be irrelevant if not for its praise for one of the deadliest attacks in world history and its admiration for the Saudi founder of al-Qaida.
In other controversial developments this week, one of the victims of the attack attending the trial wore a shirt depicting a caricature of the prophet Mohammed. She sat in the front row for half-an-hour and marched in silence to be identified by the judge, passing on one side the armoured glass that separated the court from the accused. Did she think that the cartoon could offend Rabei Osman, the "Egyptian", or other accused Muslims? Or was the shirt simply a form of expressing her feelings, after bearing the emotional load of the trial?
She was the wife of one of those killed in the 11-M attacks, and upon her departure from the courtroom, she received attention from psychologists dispatched to attend to the needs of victims and their families. The two "guests" at the trial this week, Bin Laden and Mohammed, remind us of the ideological bedrock of the threat of jihadist terrorism, a threat altogether separate from the details of the acquisition of explosives.
It seems unlikely that these terrorists, determined to kill themselves for the jihad, would have abandoned their plot if the source at the Conchita Mine had failed. The terrorists would have located alternate means to commit the attack. The witnesses and accused at this trial would then have been different, but the result of the violent conspiracy would probably have remained much the same.
