Madrid train bomb suspects seen at station - inquiry

Three young men wearing woollen caps on a warm day and with handkerchiefs covering their faces were seen at a railway station hours before the Madrid bombing atrocity that killed 190 people, the investigation into the attacks was told today.

One walked quickly towards a train, carrying a bag, while the other two stayed behind at a parked van. “My blood ran cold. I thought it was a robbery,” Luis Garrudo, a doorman in the town of Alcala de Henares, said.

Garrudo told the commission that he directed police to the suspicious van that was found to contain a cassette tape with verses from the Quran, detonators and traces of explosives of the kind used in the attack.

Ten backpacks stuffed with dynamite and shrapnel exploded on four crowded trains heading to Madrid during the morning rush hour, killing 190 passengers and bystanders, and wounding more than 2,000.

The attack is blamed on Islamic militants with possible ties to the international terrorist group al-Qaida.

Of 50 people arrested, 16 remain in jail including two who are believed to have put the explosives on the trains.

Garrudo, his face electronically scrambled for security reasons on the live cable TV broadcast of the hearing, was the first of at least 35 people scheduled to testify before the 16-member commission of the Congress of Deputies.

The commission will interview witnesses and officials, and examine police documents and other material, to review what happened on March 11 and the following days.

Thirteen people, most of them police officials, were scheduled to appear before the panel this week. The investigation is expected to last at least a month.

While declassifying some documents, the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero refused to declassify others, notably an intelligence report from October 2003.

It reportedly warned that a threat from Osama bin Laden to target Spain and other countries which deployed troops in Iraq during or after last year’s US-led invasion should be taken seriously.

It is not yet known if former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar will testify. He has not been subpoenaed, but his Popular Party says he will testify willingly if requested.