The climbing roses were in full bloom at the bomb-makers’ house near the town of Chinchón on Sunday, creeping over the porch from a garden now overrun by grass, bright red poppies and clusters of daisies.
It is an innocent-looking place, tucked away among vineyards and olive groves on a dusty lane dotted with similar weekend homes, many of them surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire.
A single strip of fading police tape across the gate is the only sign that this tranquil hideaway, 40km from Madrid, was linked to the horrific terrorist attacks on the capital’s commuter trains three months ago that left 191 people dead and 1 400 injured.
This is where Hamed Sayed Osman Rabei — a former Egyptian army explosives expert said to have helped plan the atrocity and a similar attack reportedly thwarted in Paris this week — allegedly met the petty crooks and pious university graduates who made up the Madrid bombing team.
It was also here, say neighbours, that Spanish police missed one of several opportunities to prevent the attacks from happening.
Locals became suspicious of the men who came and went in a range of vehicles.
They called the police a few weeks before the bombings. However, even though this house belonged to a suspected Islamist terrorist awaiting trial in another case, police did not question the men who used it or search the little outbuilding where some 60kg of explosives were hidden.
”They put up thick green netting along the fence a month or so before the attacks, so people couldn’t see in,” recalled Francisco, a pensioner who has a house nearby.
Spaniards are demanding to know why this and other pointers to the bombers were not detected by police.
Many of the suspects were said to be known Islamist radicals, some of whom were monitored by the police.
Police admitted that about 50 Islamists had disappeared in recent months and that only 150 officers had been working on the Islamist terrorist threat before the March 11 bombings.
At least five of those who have since been arrested turned out to be regular police informers, yet none had passed on the information that a group of Islamists were buying black market explosives.
Some of the bombers were caught on phone taps, but a lack of Arabic translators meant that the tapes were not dealt with for months.
The dynamite used in the dozen bombs that exploded on March 11 was reportedly paid for on the black market with only â,¬6 000 and a quantity of Moroccan hashish.
”We know they were watching some people and that there were tapes of phone taps that had not been translated,” said Clara Escribano, a nurse who says she still has ”a permanent film” running in her head of a gutted, silent, smoking train carriage in the moments after the blast. ”Could they have stopped them? Who knows, but it all sounds like something out of a comic book.”
Spanish police have made progress in recent weeks after their initial failures.
More than 20 people have been arrested. Seven others blew themselves up — killing one police officer — when they were surrounded in a flat in the Madrid suburb of Leganes on April 3. That blast appears to have stopped the group carrying out further attacks. They had already tried to blow up a high-speed passenger train and were planning to attack a shopping centre.
One police officer deserves the credit for the breakthrough. Without the cool thinking and calculated risk-taking of Pedro Lorente, a bomb disposal expert, the bombers might still be active.
Lorente was handed one of two bombs that failed to explode on the commuter trains. The other one had been destroyed in a controlled blast, so this was the last chance to retain a vital clue.
Lorente asked permission to defuse the bomb. He drove it to a park and, while praying to himself, detached the wires linking the explosives to the detonator and its mobile phone trigger.
The Sim card in the phone led police to the people who had provided 30 such cards to the bombers. Some of the phones had been blown up; others were still in use. Records of where the cards had been used and who they had been in contact with led police to the Chinchón house, to various other addresses and, last week, to the hideaway of the alleged mastermind, Hamed Sayed Osman Rabei, in Milan.
Commenting in El Mundo, Victoria Prego said: ”The judges must now reveal … the full degree of hamfistedness and carelessness that we are beginning to discover.” – Guardian Unlimited Â