March 11, 2004; 7:15 AM
By Keith Richburg and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Photo: Debris and covered bodies lay near a train car ripped apart by a bomb blast.
BARCELONA, March 11 -- A series of explosions ripped through several packed commuter trains and stations in the Spanish capital of Madrid during Thursday morning's rush hour, killing at least 173 people and wounding at least 500, according to Spain's interior ministry.
The attacks come three days before Spaniards go to the polls in national elections, and candidates for all the major parties immediately suspended campaigning.
There was no claim of responsibility for the bombings. Spanish officials said they were not ruling out any suspects.
But in statements, Spain's political leadership immediately focused on ETA, the Basque separatist organization, which has waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations for decades in pursuit of independence for the Basque region of northeast Spain.
In recent days, ETA declared a ceasefire only for the Catalonia region of Spain -- a tactic which many politicians here feared presaged a pre-election attack elsewhere in the country. In December, Spanish authorities confiscated a truckload of explosives they said was being transported for ETA use.
ETA has never been able to mount an attack of this scale, however. And Arnoldo Otegi, the head of the outlawed Batasuna party, the political arm of ETA, went on the radio Thursday to declare that Islamic extremists, rather than ETA, were responsible.
Spain is part of the U.S. led coalition in Iraq and has stationed troops there.
The main target of Thursday's attack was Madrid's Atocha train station, a hub of national and international train travel. The dead and injured there were said to be mostly workers and students on their way to Madrid from east of the capital.
Photo: An injured person staggers away from a train station in Madrid
The train cars at Atocha each have a capacity of 240 people.
Other explosions were reported by Spanish radio at the Pozo commuter station and the Santa Eugenia station.
Authorities said they believed that 13 backpacks packed with TNT were placed on trains. Eleven of the backpacks exploded. Another 2 backpacks were detonated by authorities afterwards.
The first explosion was reported at 7:35 a.m., the height of the morning rush hour for people who begin their work or classes at 8:00 a.m. The last explosion occurred about 20 minutes later, Spanish national radio said.
The number of dead and wounded was so large that Spanish emergency services were overstretched. Authorities made an appeal for the wounded who could still walk to not take ambulances to hospitals, and there were widespread appeals for blood donations.
The scale of the attacks, and the death toll would make it Spain's worst ever terror attack in 30 years of separatist violence, and one of the largest ever in post-war Western Europe.
ETA had become an issue in the current parliamentary election campaign.
The ruling Popular Party candidate, Mariano Rajoy, had pledged to pursue the same hard-line policies against ETA as outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. He accused the Socialist Party challenger, Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero, of being softer on terrorism, in part because the ceasefire in Catalonia had been announced after a secret meeting between a Socialist party figure and leaders of the ETA underground.
Rajoy said that showed that the Socialists could not be trusted to continue Aznar's policy of refusing to negotiate with ETA.
Zapatero had condemned the meeting.
Spain has also been on the alert for Islamic extremist terror attacks, because of the Aznar government's close ties with the United States on the Iraq War and the presence of some 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq.
Some media speculated that the simultaneous nature of today's explosions were more the hallmark of al Qaeda, not ETA. Also, journalists said, ETA in the past has most often targeted government officials and members of the security services, and ETA car bombs in the past have rarely been so deadly.
The largest known ETA attack previously came at a supermarket in 1987 in the Basque country that killed 21 people, Spanish media reports said.
ETA's rebellion, which has claimed more than 800 lives, began in the early 1960s during the repressive 40-year Spanish dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. It has continued to bedevil the democratic governments that followed Franco's death in 1976. Spain has granted the country's Basques broad autonomy but has drawn the line at independence.
Fred Barbash reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48577-2004Mar11.html