Armed police began patrolling Madrid’s underground rail and bus networks this week as the hunt continued for six members of the radical Islamist group behind last Saturday’s joint suicide bombing and the train bombings that killed 190 people last month.
The police said the number of terrorists thought to have died when they blew up themselves — and a police officer — in an apartment in Leganes, near Madrid, on Saturday night had risen to five.
”The investigation is focusing on two or three people who could have escaped [before the suicide blast] and the international connections … that might exist,” the Interior Minister, Angel Acebes, said.
The authorities distributed photo- graphs of three new suspects — Amer el-Aziz, Sanel Sjekirica and Rabei Osman Ahmed — who were said to be escaped members of the bombing gang.
European police forces had already been sent descriptions of three other gang members believed to be on the run: Said Berraj and the brothers Mohamed and Rachid Oulad Akcha.
It was confirmed this week that one of the dead in the Leganes flat was Jamal Ahmidan, who is believed to be the right-hand man of the group’s leader, the Tunisian Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, who was also killed.
The human remains left at the site of the bombing were so thoroughly destroyed that it was impossible to get fingerprints for the fifth corpse.
Court sources confirmed that two suspected members of the gang had been arrested near Madrid and in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa on Saturday.
At least one of those killed by Saturday’s bomb had rung his family to wish them a last goodbye while the group was surrounded by the police, according to Spanish news reports.
Two unexploded bombs were found in bags at the gutted apartment, Acebes confirmed.
”There could have been a series of Holy Week bombings, probably starting this weekend,” a source close to the investigation said this week.
A week of Easter processions has just begun in southern Spanish towns and cities. They bring crowds of local people and tourists into the narrow streets of the old quarters of cities such as Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Malaga. The police have searched ahouse near Granada as part of their investigation.
Nevertheless, Acebes claims that the core of the bombing group is either dead or, with 18 suspects detained, has been arrested. But the discovery of a Palestinian-style explosives belt on one of the corpses has forced the Spanish police to revise the threat as well as the way in which they arrest suspects.
There were also reports that two Sterling machine guns, similar to that brandished by a man who claimed responsibility, in a videotape found a few days after the train bombings, on behalf of someone called Abu Dujana al-Afgani, had been found at the flat.
A letter handwritten in Arabic arrived at the offices of the Spanish newspaper ABC on Saturday, purporting to be from the same person, who described himself as a leader in Europe of al-Qaeda and a member of the ”Ansar” group.
Investigators gave credence to the letter, which threatened an inferno and accused the Spanish state of ”injustices and aggression against the Muslims”.
The writer said Spain had until Sunday April 4 to withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
”If these demands are not met, we will declare war on you and … convert your country into an inferno and your blood will flow like rivers,” he said. — Â