MADRID, Spain - Ten terrorist bombs tore through trains and stations along a commuter line at the height of the morning rush hour yesterday, killing more than 190 people and wounding 1,200 others three days before Spain's general elections.
Spain initially blamed Basque separatists for the bombings, but the interior minister also said other lines of investigation were opened after police found a van yesterday with detonators and an audiotape of Quranic verses near where the bombed trains originated.
The Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said it had received a claim of responsibility issued in the name of al-Qaida.
The e-mail claim of responsibility, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the newspaper's London offices and said the brigade's death squad had penetrated one of the pillars of the crusade alliance
Spain.
This is part of settling old accounts with Spain the crusader and America's ally in its war against Islam
the claim said.
Spain had backed the U.S.-led war on Iraq despite domestic opposition, and many al-Qaida-linked terrorists have been captured in Spain or were believed to have operated from there.
After an emergency cabinet meeting, a somber Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar vowed to hunt down the attackers.
This is mass murder
he said.
The bombers used titadine, a kind of compressed dynamite also found in a bomb-laden van intercepted last month as it headed for Madrid, a source at Aznar's office said on condition of anonymity. Officials blamed the Basque Separatist Movement, or ETA, at that time.
Police found a van with detonators and an Arabic-language tape with Quranic verses in the town of Alcala de Henares, 15 miles east of Madrid, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said last night.
Police found seven detonators and the tape on the front seat of the van, Acebes said.
He added that ETA remained the main line of investigation in the blasts, Europe's worst terror attack since the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270.
Three of the four trains bombed yesterday originated in Alcala de Henares and one passed through it, the state rail company said.
Panicked commuters abandoned bags and their shoes as they trampled each other to escape the Atocha terminal, where bombs struck two trains. Some fled into darkened, dangerous tunnels at the station, a bustling hub for subway, commuter and long-distance trains just south of Madrid's famed Prado Museum.
The bodies of the dead, some with their cell phones ringing unanswered as frantic relatives tried to contact them, were carried away by rescue workers. The wounded, faces bloodied, sat on curbs as buses were pressed into service as ambulances.
One firefighter said he saw 70 bodies along a platform at El Pozo station, just east of downtown Madrid. One corpse had been blown onto the roof.
Forty coroners worked to identify remains, the national news agency Efe said, and a steady stream of taxis carried relatives to a sprawling convention center where the bodies were taken.
A total of 10 bombs, nearly all in backpacks, exploded in a 15-minute span along nine miles of the commuter line - running from Santa Eugenia to the Madrid hub of Atocha - killing 192 people and injuring more than 1,240, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
Police found and detonated three other bombs.
The blasts began about 7:40 a.m., tearing through trains or platforms on the commuter line running to the Atocha station. At least two of the bombs went off in trains at that station.
ETA has been blamed for more than 800 deaths in its decades-old campaign to carve an independent Basque homeland from territory straddling northern Spain and southwest France. However, its attacks have been on a lesser scale than yesterday's bombings, with the largest toll being 21 killed in a supermarket blast in Barcelona in 1987.
Spanish officials had said ETA was against the ropes after the arrest last year of more than 150 members or collaborators in Spain and France, including the leaders of ETA's commando network. Last year, ETA killed three people, compared with 23 in 2000 and 15 in 2001.
Spain held peace talks with ETA in the late 1980s and again in 1998 after the group declared a cease-fire that lasted 14 months. But ETA resumed attacks, and Aznar has insisted on crushing it with police measures.
No negotiation is possible or desirable with these assassins who so many times have sown death all around Spain
Aznar said yesterday.
Acebes said ETA tried a similar attack on Christmas Eve, placing bombs on two trains bound for a Madrid station that was not hit yesterday. He also noted the Feb. 29 police interception of a Madrid-bound van packed with more than 1,100 pounds of explosives. Authorities blamed ETA.
Therefore
it is absolutely clear and evident that the terrorist organization ETA was looking to commit a major attack
Acebes said. The only thing that varies is the train station that was targeted.
A top Basque politician, Arnold Otegi, denied the separatists were behind the blasts and blamed Arab resistance.
Otegi said ETA always phones in warnings before attacking. Acebes said there was no warning yesterday.
President Bush called Aznar to express solidarity and sympathy, condemning this vicious attack of terrorism in the strongest possible terms
National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said.
The United States stands resolutely with Spain in the fight against terrorism in all its forms and against the particular threat that Spain faces from the evil of ETA terrorism
added Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Rescue workers were overwhelmed, said Enrique Sanchez, an ambulance driver who went to Santa Eugenia station, about six miles southeast of the Atocha station.
There was one carriage totally blown apart. People were scattered all over the platforms. I saw legs and arms. I won't forget this ever. I've seen horror
Sanchez said.
Shards of twisted metal were scattered by rails in the Atocha station at the spot where an explosion severed a train in two.
I saw many things explode in the air ... it was horrible
