US lawyer linked to Madrid bombings

THE fingerprints of an American lawyer arrested over the Madrid terror bombings were found on bag containing detonators of the kind used in the March attack, the Spanish government said yesterday.

Muslim convert Brandon Mayfield, 37, from Oregon, was arrested by the FBI in the US on Thursday.

The detonators were found in a plastic bag inside a stolen van after the March 11 rail bombings. The van had been left near the suburban Madrid station from which three of the four bombed trains departed.

The Spanish government says the detonators in the bag were of the same kind used in the attacks, which killed 191 people and have been linked to the al-Qaida network.

The van was found in the town of Alcala de Henares, about 20 miles north-east of Madrid. Inside it police also found an Arabic-language cassette tape with verses from the Koran.

Following his arrest, Mayfield's home in Portland was searched, as was his office. The lawyer is the first person in the United States to be drawn into the investigation into the bombing. So far 18 people have been charged in connection with the bombings in Spain six with murder and the others with collaboration or belonging to a terrorist organisation.

Mayfield's wife, Mona, said her husband was "a good man, a good father, a good husband".

"It's just unfair. It's unfair to myself and it is unfair to my children," she said.

The couple have two sons, aged 10 and 15, and a 12-year-old daughter.

Her husband, a former army officer, was born in the small Oregon coastal community of Coos Bay.

He converted to Islam in 1989, she said, and attends a mosque in the nearby town of Beaverton. The mosque was also reportedly searched by FBI agents yesterday.

Earlier this year in Portland, the last of six men and a woman were sentenced on charges of conspiring to wage war against the United States by helping al-Qaida and the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.

Mayfield had represented one of those convicted, Jeffrey Leon Battle, in a custody case.