Sentencing in Madrid JINSA Report #715, 2 November 2007
The Spanish tribunal handed down sentences of nearly 40,000 years each to three perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people and injured 1,800. Rogelio Alonso, a Spanish expert, said the trial showed "it is possible to fight this type of [Islamist] terrorism through the courts... we already had an efficient legal framework in place because of ETA; we had the right laws to confront terrorism." Au contraire. The extravagant sentences were largely symbolic (under Spanish law, one cannot serve more than 40 years), the other 18 convicted received sentences of 10 years or less, and seven were acquitted. A long sentence went to the man who owned the shop where most of the phone cards used in the mobile phones that detonated the explosives were bought, on the grounds that without him, there would have been no bombing. The verdicts prove that the law enforcement approach is insufficient to deal with terrorism and the standards of evidence required to convict in a Western courtroom can allow masterminds to escape and only foot soldiers to be convicted, assuming they survive the event. No one was convicted of conceiving, planning, recruiting or masterminding, and no connection was established to larger terror organization. Indeed an American expert told reporters, "There isn't the slightest bit of evidence of any relationship with al Qaeda. We've been looking at it closely for years and we've been briefed by everybody under the sun... and nothing connects them." Really? Among the acquitted was Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, known as "Mohammad the Egyptian." He is now in prison in Italy, convicted of belonging to an international terrorist group (which one?). An Italian wiretap had Osman boasting, according to Spanish prosecutors, of being "the thread behind the Madrid plot," but translators in Madrid disputed the translation from the Arabic. A piece of paper found in Osman's Italian apartment with the words "martyr," "honey" and "11-03-04" (3-11-04 in the United States) was called "not conclusive" by the Spanish judges. Furthermore, the Madrid bombing had the physical hallmarks of al Qaeda, including nails in the bombs (they borrowed that from the Palestinians) and an international group of Sunni Moslem bombers. And there was the timing. The blast occurred three days before an election between a candidate who put Spain in the Iraq Coalition, and one who promised to withdraw from it. Having lost Afghanistan, al Qaeda leadership needed to control Iraq; peeling away the coalition partners by terrorizing their people would be important. The Madrid tribunal didn't go there, but without an intellectual framework, each terror event appears to occur in a vacuum. In our war, if governments don't see the larger pattern of threats to Western society, they will end up banning cell phone cards (or stripping passengers in airports) instead of eliminating al Qaeda cells. There are those for whom finding an al Qaeda link in Madrid would have been inconvenient - starting with the Spanish Prime Minister. While we hope the verdict was not orchestrated by politics, it is hard to imagine that a court could have found the cellphone card salesman guilty of murder without convicting the mastermind. 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