Spain alleges US lawyer linked to Madrid attacks

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 today.

Muslim convert Brandon Mayfield, 37, from Oregon, was taken into custody by the FBI in the US yesterday.

The plastic shopping bag was found inside a stolen van left near the suburban Madrid station from which three of the four bombed trains departed, an Interior Ministry official said in the Spanish capital

The detonators in the bag were of the same kind used in the March 11 attacks, which killed 191 people, the government has said.

The attacks have been linked to al-Qaida.

The van was found in 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, police have said.

His home in Portland was searched, as was his office, a government official said.

Mayfield is the first person in the United States to be drawn into the investigation.

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 US army officer, was born in the small Oregon coastal community of Coos Bay, she said.

He converted to Islam in 1989, she said, and attends a mosque in the nearby town of Beaverton that was 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 represented one of those convicted, Jeffrey Leon Battle, in a custody case.