LEGANES, Spain, 5 April 2004 — The suspected Tunisian ringleader of last month’s Madrid train bombings blew himself up with at least three accomplices after police cornered them in a suburban Madrid apartment, officials said yesterday.
Serhane ben Abdelmajid Farkhet, known as El Tunecino (The Tunisian), was one of several men who chanted defiant Islamic slogans in Arabic before detonating a charge that also killed a policeman, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
Another of the dead, Moroccan Abdennabi Kounjaa, was also among six suspects being hunted in connection with the March 11 bombings of four commuter trains, which killed 191 people.
Acebes said the same group also planted a bomb, defused on Friday, that had been intended to derail a high-speed train.
Fifteen police officers were wounded by the explosion during the Saturday night raid in Leganes, a suburb of the capital, as a large explosives cache went off. One was in serious condition.
“The core group of those who carried out the terrorist act have been detained or died in the collective suicide,” Acebes said, referring to the March 11 attacks. “We have to highlight the magnificent work done by the security forces.”
Fifteen people, mostly Moroccans, were already in custody.
Further attacks in the planning had been averted, Acebes said, even though two or three people may have escaped before the apartment blew apart. Officials said a fifth corpse may have been found but could not be certain until DNA analysis was complete.
Police found 10 kg of dynamite in the apartment and 200 detonators of a type used in the Madrid bombings and in the device buried under the Madrid-Seville high-speed rail line on the eve of this week’s busy Easter holiday travel season.
The judge investigating the train bombings had identified the 35-year-old Farkhet as the “personal leader and coordinator” of the attacks, and Acebes has singled out the shadowy Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group as prime suspect.
Investigators are also searching further afield for a possible mastermind who may have ordered the attacks from abroad with indications pointing to radicals sympathetic to Al-Qaeda network.
Two days after the Madrid bombings and on the eve of a general election, a videotape surfaced in which a purported Al-Qaeda spokesman claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them revenge for Spanish support of the war in Iraq.
The next day voters surprisingly threw out the pro-American conservatives and elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialists who have pledged to pull Spain’s 1,300 troops out of Iraq unless the United Nations takes charge there by June 30.
Zapatero and outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar were among 350 mourners who attended a memorial for the dead police officer, 41-year-old Javier Torrontera, at the elite Special Operations Group’s base at Guadalajara, near Madrid.
Stunned Leganes residents watched yesterday as trucks took out mounds of debris from the shattered apartment building.
“I can’t believe they were living here and none of us knew what they were up to. How disgusting. We feel indignant, afraid, helpless. None of us has forgotten March 11,” said Yolanda, a woman of about 50.
On Saturday, the suspects started shooting when they spotted police moving in and then set off the massive explosion.
One body which had yet to be identified was wearing an explosives belt of the type favored by Palestinian militants, Acebes said. It contained two kg of explosives.
