Spanish police arrested five more suspects in the Madrid train attack yesterday, with one reportedly believed to have been part of the team of six or more who planted the bombs that killed 202 commuters last week.
The five men held on Thursday were said to be Moroccan or north African in origin, with one of them a Spanish national.
Three were arrested in the commuter town of Alcalá de Henares, 24km from Madrid, where all four trains had stopped.
The arrests came as three Moroccans and two Indians who were detained on Saturday were brought before a magistrate, Juan del Olmo, to be formally placed under investigation, after five days of being held under special anti-terrorist legislation.
Thursday’s arrests confirmed that the police were concentrating their efforts on the Moroccan connection. They came amid widespread reports of a link between last Thursday’s terrorist attacks and bombings that killed 44 people in Casablanca last May.
El Mundo newspaper reported that the man who appeared in a videotape claiming responsibility for the attack in the name of al-Qaeda had spoken in the Moroccan cherja dialect of Arabic, had held a machine gun and had a flag behind him adorned with the words: ”There is only one God, and that is Allah”.
The authorities have not released copies of the tape.
It was confirmed on Thursday that another magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, has been secretly investigating Spanish connections to the Casablanca bombings for nearly 10 months.
Spain’s outgoing government partially declassified selected intelligence reports on Thursday to try to show that it had told the truth about the train bombs, although it initially attributed the explosions to the armed Basque separatist group Eta.
Street protests accusing the government of hiding the facts on the eve of the election were considered to have contributed to the surprise victory of the incoming Socialist prime minister, José Luis RodrÃÂguez Zapatero.
”Since the terrorist massacre, the government has communicated absolutely all the truth to public opinion, without hiding, manipulating or delaying any information,” a government spokesperson, Eduardo Zaplana, said.
The documents appeared to show that the police and intelligence services believed Eta was the most likely suspect, at least until an Arabic tape and detonators were found in a van on Thursday afternoon. But, with paragraphs reportedly obliterated for ”security reasons”, it was not possible to establish a complete picture of what happened that day.
The documents also did little to explain why, after the van had been found, the outgoing government of José MarÃÂa Aznar continued to claim that Eta was the prime suspect.
The government was widely accused of blaming Eta for political reasons, because Aznar’s tough line on the Basque terrorist group was popular, while his support for the Iraq war encountered huge domestic opposition.
”We have suffered a campaign of defamation, of insinuations and also of lies with the sole aim of discrediting the government and presenting it as a liar and manipulator,” Zaplana said.
”The false accusations have reached inconceivable extremes, passing moral and political limits. We can lose elections, but the government cannot sit by while it is called a liar.”
Zapatero’s pledge to bring Spanish troops back from Iraq if control was not handed to the UN by July 1 has run into opposition from the American Democratic party presidential challenger, John Kerry.
Kerry said: ”I call on prime minister Zapatero to reconsider his decision and to send the message that terrorists cannot win by their acts of terror.”
El Mundo reported on Thursday that the death toll in the Madrid attacks could fall. Forensic scientists dealing with the charred and dismembered remains of the unidentified victims have decided that they are dealing with fewer people than they originally believed. – Guardian Unlimited Â