Police found a bomb on Friday on a high-speed rail line between Madrid and Seville, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said. Bomb-disposal experts alerted by a railway employee found 10kg to 12kg of explosives, possibly dynamite, under a track about 60km south of Madrid on the route to the southern city of Seville.
A Spanish judge issued five international arrest warrants on Wednesday for suspects in the Madrid train bombings and re-arrested a Moroccan suspect, a court official said. Judge Juan del Olmo was forwarding the warrants to authorities in Britain, Morocco and France.
Examining Judge Juan del Olmo on Friday began questioning two suspects linked to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, judicial sources said. The sources said Del Olmo was interrogating Faisal Alluch and Khalid Oulad Akcha, arrested last weekend with two other suspects. The four are all Moroccan nationals.
Political leaders from around Europe joined the Spanish royal family on Wednesday in attending an emotionally charged mass for the 190 identified victims of the March 11 bombings in Madrid — amid fears that similar terror could strike other capitals.
The South African Foreign Affairs department said on Thursday afternoon that ”no-one from South Africa has died in Equatorial Guinea” after Spanish newspapers reported that a SA mercenary suspected of plotting a coup in that country had been tortured to death.
New charges for alleged mercenaries
At least 190 people were killed and more than 1Â 000 injured early on Thursday in near-simultaneous explosions on trains in Madrid at the height of morning commuter traffic — only 72 hours ahead of Spanish general elections. Thirteen bombs were planted around Madrid and 10 exploded, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
Spanish doctors have amputated an injured arm, attached it to the patient’s groin for nine days, and replanted it on its stump in an unprecedented operation, news reports said on Thursday. The operation was the first in the world in which a reattached limb was amputated in order to join it with another part of the body.
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/ 16 February 2004
Former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said on Spanish radio in Madrid on Monday that at no point had he ever said that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Spanish government based its justification for supporting the war in Iraq on UN claims that Iraq possessed the weapons.
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/ 8 December 2003
Meteorologists in Spain on Monday warned against further severe rainfall and storms following a weekend in which six people died in severe weather conditions. Forecasters predicted additional rainfall of up to 100 litre per square metre and snow at levels above 600m.
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/ 24 November 2003
Copito de Nieve (Snowflake), the world’s only known white gorilla, died on Monday in the Barcelona zoo. The albino gorilla, which was estimated to be about 40 years old, suffered from incurable skin cancer. The gorilla was a worldwide celebrity, and even made the cover of the National Geographic magazine.
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/ 23 October 2003
A donors’ conference to help war-ravaged Iraq opened on Thursday in Madrid amid high hopes of important financial pledges, but United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan made clear that such contributions would not amount to a wholesale endorsement of United States policies in Iraq.
In a sunny corner of the world where nothing much ever happened, Martin Moreno climbed atop a leaking American hydrogen bomb and smiled as he tried to pry loose a souvenir.
Spain and Portugal feared an environmental catastrophe on Tuesday when the leaking oil tanker MS Prestige began to break up as it was towed towards Portuguese waters.
Got a problem? Dump it on Africa
Spanish chef Ferran Adria, once described as ”the Salvador Dali of the kitchen”, and France’s ”nouvelle cuisine” guru Michel Guerard were holding a tete-a-tete in the Spaniard’s El Bulli restaurant on the Catalan coast.
At least six people were injured when a car bomb exploded on Friday morning in the resort of Fuengirola on Spain’s southern Costa del Sol, ahead of an EU Summit.