Grief-stricken Spaniards prepare for general election

Traumatised by terrorism, Spaniards today prepared for general elections as a nation in grief, with the ruling party favoured to win and insisting that Basque separatists remain the prime suspect in the rail bombings that killed 199 people.

As a cold drizzle fell on Madrid, what would normally be a day of leisure and reflection before Sunday’s voting became instead another 24 hours of anguish and mourning. Families have started burying and cremating their dead, state radio said.

Mariano Rajoy, the governing Popular Party’s candidate for prime minister in Sunday’s election, said in an interview published by the newspaper El Mundo that the government still believed the culprits were the armed Basque group Eta, rather than Islamic elements.

“There are facts in my possession which make me believe it was Eta,” Rajoy was quoted as saying. “And, beyond what I’m told, I have a moral conviction that it was them.”

Eta issued an apparently unprecedented denial Friday, saying it had nothing to do with the string of 10 bombs blasts in the Madrid commuter rail network. The toll stands at 199 dead and nearly 1,500 injured.

Grief blanketed even the national pastime, soccer. Players at the 10 games scheduled for this evening were to wear black armbands and observe a minute’s silence before kickoff.

Debate on who is behind the attacks could sway voters in Sunday’s election.

If Eta is deemed responsible, that could boost support for Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s hand-picked candidate to succeed him as prime minister. Both have supported a crackdown on Eta’s campaign for an independent state in northern Spain, ruling out talks and backing a ban on Eta’s political wing, Batasuna.

However, if Thursday’s bombings are seen by voters as the work of al Qaida, that could draw their attention to Aznar’s vastly unpopular decision to endorse the US-led invasion of Iraq and deploy Spanish troops there.

Rajoy is 3-5 percentage points ahead of Socialist candidate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in polls. No surveys have been released since the attacks. Under Spanish law, last Sunday was the final day to publish survey data.

Saturday would normally have been a so-called day of reflection, with campaigning banned. But after the blasts, parties abruptly ended the campaign.

On Friday night, millions of people all over Spain poured into the streets to protest against Spain’s worst terrorist attack ever, shouting “Cowards!” and “Assassins!”

Many of the estimated 2.3 million marchers in Madrid huddled against a steady rain in a bobbing mass of umbrellas that clogged the capital’s squares and the area around the Atocha station, where two of the four trains blew up during Thursday morning’s rush hour.

“It is not raining. Madrid is crying,” said Jorge Mendez, a 20-year-old telecommunications student.

In a show of national unity, massive crowds gathered in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia and even in Spain’s Canary Islands off Western Africa. State TV said nationwide, more than 11 million marched – one-quarter of Spain’s 42 million people.

Aznar, who was joined by other European leaders as he led one march, pledged on Friday to hunt down the terrorists whose bombs sparked new fears about Europe’s vulnerability to attack.

Aznar and his government ministers have blamed the armed group Eta, which has fought for decades for an independent Basque homeland. But there was concern that Islamic militants and perhaps even the al Qaida terror network had been involved.

“So far, none of the intelligence services or security forces we have contacted have provided reliable information to the effect that it could have been an Islamic terrorist organisation,” Interior Minister Angel Acebes said Friday.

The attack’s lethal co-ordination and timing – 10 explosions within 15 minutes - suggested al Qaida. But the compressed dynamite used in the backpack bombs is an explosive favoured by Eta.

Eta denied responsibility, according to Gara, a Basque newspaper that the armed group uses to issue statements. Gara said a caller claiming to represent Eta phoned its newsroom Friday to deny government allegations that the group was to blame.

It was the first time Eta was known to have issued such a denial. The group normally claims its attacks in statements to pro-Basque independence media several weeks later.

Suspicions of al-Qaida involvement gained weight after police found a stolen van with seven detonators and an Arabic-language tape of Koranic verses parked in a suburb near where the stricken trains originated.

A London-based Arabic newspaper also received a claim of responsibility in al Qaida’s name that called the attack “part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America’s ally in its war against Islam.”

In a chilling account of the bombings, Spanish radio station Cadena Ser broadcast a 12-second recording of an unidentified woman who had called a colleague’s voice mail after an initial blast on a train at the Atocha station.

The woman, who survived, was in the process of fleeing as she frantically says: “I’m in Atocha.

There’s a bomb on the train! We had to -” and then two more blasts are heard amid her screams.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, only the Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people in 2002 have been more deadly.

Marchers in Madrid held banners reading, “No to Terror” and “Today Our Tears Reach Heaven.” Another read simply, ”Who and Why?”

Before the rallies began, offices, shops and cafes across Spain emptied at noon as people stood in silence on the streets to honour the dead. Authorities had requested a minute’s silence but many people in Madrid stood in drizzly, chilly weather for about 10 minutes.

The silence ended when the people broke into spontaneous applause in a traditional sign of respect and solidarity.

Aznar stood outside the presidential palace with senior officials. The silence there was broken when someone angrily shouted: “Send the terrorists to the firing squad!”

In Barcelona, subways and buses halted and construction work stopped. In northern Spain’s Basque region, hundreds of students and professors at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa also stood in silence.

In Madrid, black bows of mourning dotted the city, on shop windows, on flags draped from balconies, and on lapels. Relatives converged on a makeshift morgue, searching for missing loved ones.

Commuters fell silent as their trains rumbled past the bombed-out hulks at Atocha station.

At Atocha, mourners sobbed, lit candles and left flowers as the normally bustling hub turned quiet.