Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (27 page)

In June 2003, the Tunisian got as job as a real estate agent and in two months sold four apartments in Tetuán, Morocco, but was unhappy. “We have to do something for our brothers in Iraq who are being killed,” the Tunisian said to his friend Khalid Pardo. “We have to do something here, break into a jewelry shop, steal money for jihad, kill a policeman.” Pardo declined, saying he had a family to care for, and their friendship became strained. Another friend remembered the Tunisian saying to him in the butcher shop in Lavapies, “These infidels, we have to kill them.”

At the Alhambra restaurant on Tribulete Street in Lavapies, across the street from Jamal Zougam’s telephone-and-Internet shop, the Tunisian refused to allow Zougam to sit at his table. He accused Zougam of being “too soft” on the enemies of Islam. (Zougam would later be identified by eyewitnesses as having left his knapsack on one of the trains just before it exploded, and he will be sentenced to 42,992 years in prison for 191 murders.) The Tunisian similarly berated Basel Ghalyoun, another friend from the picnic outings at the Rio Navalcarnero, for being a coward (Ghalyoun will get twelve years for “belonging to a terrorist organization,” as the prosecution couldn’t prove an operational role in the plot). But at the time, after all was said and done, a lot was said and nothing done—until the Chinaman returned from prison and teamed up with the Tunisian in the early fall of 2003.

HATCHING THE PLOT

By late fall 2003, the Chinaman and the Tunisian were trying to raise money for the plot, tapping everyone they knew. But they still weren’t sure how, where, or when to act until an Internet tract gave them the idea of blowing up something in Spain around the time of the March 2004 elections. The tract first appeared on the Zarqawi-affiliated Web site Global Islamic Media Front, which the Tunisian and the Chinaman had been logging on to systematically. The Chinaman especially identified with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Like the Chinaman, Zarqawi had been a violent criminal and Jew-hater who radicalized to jihad in prison. When authorities recovered the Chinaman’s computer, they found it full of Zarqawi’s rants and accolades to the man who claimed al-Qaeda’s “mantle in Mesopotamia.”

On New Year’s Eve 2003, the Tunisian drove the Chinaman up to Bilbao in Spain’s northern Basque country to collect drug money from a debt; they were financing their jihad in Spain. The Chinaman phoned Rosa, and in the background she overheard the Tunisian: “Leave her. She’s a Christian, leave her.” Rosa snapped at the Chinaman: “Is there a parrot with you?” The Chinaman snapped back: “Nobody tells me what to do.” When he arrived in Bilbao, he calmly walked into a bar, whipped out a pistol, and kneecapped a fellow drug dealer who owed him money. Then the Chinaman called out after another man, who ran into the street, that he, too, had better pay up or else.

Beginning in January 2004, details of the plot were hammered out at a farmhouse outside Madrid that formerly belonged to the Tunisian’s brother-in-law, who had since returned to Morocco. The brother of Rachid “the Rabbit” Aglif later testified at the trial that he and the Rabbit would bring lamb meat from their butcher shop for barbecues there and at the Navalcarnero River. But the picnics no longer included wives or children. The farmhouse and river meetings now primarily involved the Chinaman and his friends rather than the Tunisian’s circle, although the Tunisian was regularly at the farmhouse leading the discussions. It seems that when push came to shove, several in the Tunisian’s religious circle skirted the call for martyrdom, but the Chinaman’s petty-criminal circle stood fast.

At the farmhouse, the groups coordinated efforts to acquire the weapon components and related paraphernalia: explosives, detonators, cell phones, rucksacks, and shrapnel. The Chinaman’s cousin, Hamid Ahmidan, later testified that he saw members of the Chinaman’s circle in the kitchen manipulating a device with cables. At Hamid’s own home, after the bombing, police found 59 kilos of hashish, worth 75,000 euros, and 125,000 tablets of Ecstasy, worth 1,275,000 euros. (The prosecution asked for a sentence of twenty-three years for Hamid’s complicity in the plot, which he got.)

The Chinaman frequently called Carmen Toro-Trashorras’s phone to coordinate the procurement and transfer of explosives (though Carmen claimed it was really her husband, Emilio, who was using her phone to do this). Emilio worked with a combination of his contacts, small-time Spanish crooks, and the Chinaman’s associates to procure and transfer the explosives. But the relationship between Emilio’s circle and the Chinaman’s now extended beyond business. On February 14, the Chinaman, Mohammed Oulad Akcha, and the Rabbit attended Emilio and Carmen’s wedding.

The Chinaman picked up the newlyweds at the Madrid airport after their return from a honeymoon in the Canary Islands and took them directly to the farmhouse. Carmen later claimed that the Chinaman merely wanted to show the couple some property for sale. Spanish investigators later concluded that bomb preparations were going on in the house at the time. After the bombing, Carmen went free, not because the trial judges thought that she was looking for real estate while her husband was making bombs, but because—in the classic ploy of a prisoner’s dilemma—by turning on her husband she could walk.

On February 28 and 29, the Chinaman, Mohammed Oulad Akcha, and Kounjaa’ traveled to the Conchita mine in Asturias to pick up the explosives from Emilio. The next day, Rachid Oulad Akcha, Rifaat the Kid, and Otman El Gnaoui (who had been providing false identity papers to the Chinaman) appeared. A seventeen-year-old, nicknamed El Gitanillo (the Little Gypsy), who acted as a delivery boy for Emilio, overheard his boss telling the Chinaman, “Don’t forget the nails and the screws.” That and Carmen’s crocodile love would get Emilio sent up for 34,715 years.

Jamal Zougam, who now seems to have jumped into the plot with both feet after some earlier hesitation over the Tunisian’s willingness to kill Spanish civilians, used his business ties to acquire the phones and SIM cards needed to detonate the homemade bombs. Kaliji, the Syrian-born undercover policeman who had earlier infiltrated Yarkas’s circle for Judge Garzón, provided the SIM cards and reported his suspicions, but there was no follow-up from the police or Spanish intelligence. A partial thumbprint on a SIM card led police to their first suspects only after the bombing.

The group made the bombs, filling each sport sack with ten kilos of dynamite surrounded by shrapnel of nails and screws, and connected to a cell phone-triggered detonator.

On Thursday morning, March 11, 2004, the plotters rose early and drove a stolen Renault Kangoo van to the town of Alcalá de Henares, where they boarded and exited four different trains bound for Madrid, leaving their bombs behind.

At 7:38
A.M
., a train about to pull into Madrid’s Atocha Station was ripped apart by three explosions, which sent hunks of human flesh smashing into the windows of nearby apartments. Sixteen seconds later, four bombs demolished another train nearing Atocha, dispersing the body parts of all kinds of people—Christian and Muslim, men and women, old and young, students and workers, and children going to daycare. Had the bombs gone off when the trains were already inside the station, thousands would probably have died in Spain’s busiest terminal: Trains at that hour are filled with daily commuters, including many immigrants lured by Spain’s then-booming economy.

Five kilometers away, at 7:40
A.M
., another pair of bombs destroyed a train at El Pozo Station. At 7:43 a final bomb exploded at the suburban Santa Eugenia Station, killing and wounding scores more, just as the first rescue crews arrived at Atocha. About a third of the dead were immigrants from eleven countries, including a Polish man and his six-month-old daughter.

Sanae Ben Salah, thirteen, was one of three murdered Moroccans whose broken bodies were mourned at the M-30 mosque that weekend. A child of divorced parents who lived with her uncle in Alcalá de Henares, she took the morning train to school in Madrid and came around to the mosque as often as she could. She was shipped home to Morocco in a metal crate.

Around 11
A.M
., police in Alcalá de Henares received a tip from someone who spotted the white Renault Kangoo by the train station. The license plate didn’t match the van, the sort of detail ETA never overlooks, but no one bothered to look inside until later that afternoon. Meanwhile, Prime Minister José María Aznar, whose conservative Popular Party was up for re-election on a platform that called for muscling ETA, suspected that ETA had beaten him to the punch. Although his party was ahead of the Socialists by five points in the polls, Aznar immediately tried to convert the bombing into what seemed likely to be an election-winning crusade against the archenemy. (In 1995, only the armor on his car prevented Aznar himself from being assassinated by an ETA bomb.)

But in the van, police found a tape with Koranic verses in the cassette player, and under the seat were seven detonators like those used to denote the Goma-2 explosives identified in the trains. Koranic recitations and Goma-2 are not ETA’s thing; yet that evening Aznar assured the editors of Spain’s leading newspapers that all evidence pointed to the Basque separatists. He appealed to the patriotic solidarity of the editor of the Socialist-leaning daily
El País
to print the story, which
El País
¹
did. The editor of rival
El Mundo,
which supported Aznar’s Popular Party, was more cautious and wanted concrete evidence before going all out for the government’s tale.

Around midnight evidence started pouring in. Detectives found 10 kilos of Emilio’s Goma-2 in a sports bag, surrounded by screws and nails. The explosives were connected to a detonator, which was attached by wires to a cell phone. The phone’s SIM card led to two merchants who sold Zougam the hot phones and then to Zougam himself. Several survivors from one train would later identify Zougam as one of those who left a bag on board a train that morning. The dialed numbers recorded on the phone chip also led to a wider social network of North African immigrants with no known ties to ETA.

Friday afternoon the interior minister, Ángel Acebes, was still insisting that ETA was the only real suspect, although investigators on the ground knew better. Bits of evidence and assertions linking the bombing to Islamists angry at the Aznar government’s support of U.S. actions in Iraq were filtering out across the Web and radio and into the streets. By evening, over a quarter of Spain’s population of 40 million was in the streets demonstrating against the violence and, already for many, against what was starting to look like a government snow job to keep the illusion of ETA’s involvement going until at least the election. An enraged public voted in the Socialists, who had promised to pull out of Iraq, just as the plotters had hoped.

El País,
feeling used, began an unrelenting campaign against Aznar and his party for supposedly tricking the nation for political gain. Although the still-fragmentary evidence clearly pointed away from ETA,
El País
incautiously insisted that it clearly pointed toward Al Qaeda. (El
Mundo
threw earlier caution to the wind to attack the Socialists and defend the ETA thesis.) And truth, as often happens in our political world, fell into the abyss.

THE PLOTTERS BECOME MARTYRS

With the Aznar government still insisting the attack was ETA, a video soon came to light from an anonymous tip-off to a Madrid television station. The government said that a man speaking Arabic with a Moroccan accent said the attacks were revenge for Spain’s “collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies.” He mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan in particular and said more blood would flow if the injustices did not end. (The Spanish government backed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq despite polls showing 90 percent opposition to it from the Spanish public.)

“You want life and we want death,” said the man in the tape, who was later identified as the Chinaman.

Immediately after the attack, the Chinaman went into hiding. He visited his brother Mohammed, who later testified that he couldn’t look the Chinaman in the face. “How could you do this in a country that took you in?” Mohammed asked him.

Abdenabi Kounjaa’ left behind a statement that Spanish authorities found at the house of a fellow Moroccan, Saed El Harrak, a religious friend whom Kounjaa’ had first met on the job at a construction site in 2002. El Harrak says he last saw Kounjaa’ on March 10, the day before the bombings, but that he was unaware of the statement: “Why would I have held on to it and not burned it if I knew what it was?” El Harrak later told the court. Part of Kounjaa’s “final testament” reads: “Do not have pity on the lousy infidels because they declared war on us. They kill Muslims every day in every part of the world and all of them keep silent.”

The plotters had drawn up a list of further targets and planted a bomb along the route of the high-speed train that travels between Madrid and Toledo. The cables leading to the bomb were spotted in the nick of time by personnel inspecting the tracks. The Kid’s fingerprints identified him as the one who placed the bomb, but Spanish authorities told me that it was the Chinaman who likely taught the Kid what to do.
²

On April 2, 2004, a handwritten fax in Arabic was sent to a news outlet claiming responsibility for the March 11 bombings and for placing a bomb on the high-speed train tracks in the name of “Al Qaeda in Europe.” The handwriting was later identified as the Tunisian’s.