Madrid train bombings: An open wound, twenty years on

On the morning of March 11, 2004, a series of ten coordinated explosions on four commuter trains bound for Madrid‘s Atocha station during rush hour, killing 191 people.

José Maria Aznar, then prime minister, and his Popular Party (PP) immediately pointed the finger at the Basque separatists of the ETA who, since the late 1960s, had been responsible for the deaths of more than 800 people in the country.

However, a branch of al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Madrid attacks that same evening and called for the withdrawal of Spanish forces from the military intervention in Iraq.

The PP’s blunder cost it the general elections held four days later and saw the victory of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero‘s Socialist Party.

A few weeks later, seven suspects in the attacks blew up the apartment in which they had been hiding, killing a member of the Spanish special forces. I took another two years of investigation to identify 29 suspects from local Islamist groups, of whom 21 were convicted.

In the end, no direct link with a supranational terrorist organisation has ever been found. Today, twenty years after the Madrid bombings, the families of the victims are still waiting to know the truth.