One early spring morning of bloodshed and carnage appeared to have given the armed Basque separatist group Eta, officially blamed for the Madrid attacks, a horrendous increase in its toll of victims, as experts said a group cornered by police might have lashed out in desperation.
Amongst the actors weighing against Eta’s alleged authorship were the robust denials issued by people from the banned Batasuna separatist party who usually refuse to criticise the group.
”The Basque pro-independence left wishes to clearly express the most absolute rejection of what happened today in Madrid. Indiscriminate actions against civilians, against workers … are absolutely and firmly rejected,” former Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi said in a statement.
A similar statement from Batasuna’s representative in the European Parliament, Koldo Gorostiaga, said: ”The action should be considered as a massacre and that it does not have any justification.”
Experts, however, said the attack might fit with a new, deadlier Eta, run by a relatively fresh intake of men and women who are mostly in their 20s and on the defensive as the arrest rate of activists has risen to more than 100 a year.
Recent Eta propaganda videos have shown young people, many of them graduates of the school of street violence, demonstrating weapons.
”This is a new generation of people in their teens and 20s. They may not feel they are under the same political constraints as before,” said Dr John Gearson, a senior lecturer in terrorism at the defence studies department of King’s College London. ”If it is Eta’s work, then it appears to be a new style of attack, or a new wing of the movement. It’s like ‘Real’ or ‘Continuity’ Eta,” he added, drawing a parallel with Northern Ireland’s dissident republican organisations which have ignored the general ceasefire.
But a switch to indiscriminate attacks bound to provoke carnage among ordinary people was a sign of desperation, experts said. ”If this is Eta, then it is by no means a sign of strength. It would be a case of trying to give an appearance of a strength that they do not really have,” said Rogelio Alonso, a terrorism expert at Madrid’s Rey Juan Carlos University.
The group’s decline over the past few years has been spectacular, with three people killed last year, and 250 Eta members caught by police in France and Spain in the past two years. Police reportedly believe that only 200 or so activists are left.
Spanish government sources had originally insisted the blasts were the work of Eta, despite the differences between them and previous attacks.
Until Thursday the most deadly Eta attack was in 1987 when a blast at an underground car park at a Barcelona supermarket killed 21 people. Eta later claimed it had made mistake. Thursday’s blast did not come with any warning, nor was it aimed against the police, military, political or judicial targets at which the group has traditionally taken aim.
Car bombs designed to cause damage to economic targets, such as tourist hotels and airports, have almost always been exploded after a telephoned warning.
”It is absolutely clear and evident that the terrorist organisation Eta was looking to commit a major attack,” the interior minister, Angel Acebes, said.
”The only thing that varies is the train station that was targeted,” he said, referring to a failed Christmas attack at Madrid’s Chamartin rail station.
Government sources told The Guardian that the explosives used included a type of dynamite known as titadine, a quantity of which was stolen from a French mine by Eta several years ago and which has appeared in most recent Eta bombs.
A first signal of Eta’s apparent change of tactics came when explosives in travel bags were found on a train headed to Madrid on Christmas Eve, and in possession of an Eta member who intended to put a second satchel on board, they said.
On February 29 police stopped a van about 130km south-east of Madrid and found half a ton of potassium chloride compound, titadine, a core fuse and an electrical detonator — enough to demolish a tall building. Two alleged Eta members were arrested.
”Eta does use backpacks for planting bombs and it does attack trains,” Dr Gearson said. ”If it’s attention they want, maybe they have decided to kill people rather than targeting small tourist hotels.”
Aznar, who was the target of a 1995 bomb attack and went on to make the battle against Eta one of his main priorities, said that his People’s party would not change because of the attacks. ”The terrorists have an operating capacity weaker than ever,” Aznar said, but also a ”tragically active” willingness to keep fighting. ”No one should aspire to anything other than the concrete defeat of terrorism, a complete and total defeat, surrender without conditions of any kind.”
On Thursday night the newspaper El Mundo reported that the EU’s police agency reported in December that Eta was changing its operating method. It warned of a scaling up of attacks, and talked specifically of attacks in the capital in which several devices would be successively detonated in strategically important locations. It also warned of possible attacks in France.
The director of Europol, Jürgen Storbeck, who was in Rome to talk to an Italian parliamentary committee, told the Italian news agency Ansa: ”It could have been Eta … but we’re dealing with an attack that doesn’t correspond to the modus operandi they have adopted up to now.”
Despite Spain’s recent successes against Eta, ”there could still be other cells that have not been brought under control and could have become more extremist,” he added. – Guardian Unlimited Â