Spain 'appeased Saudis over Muslim terrorists'

The Spanish government deliberately ignored a mosque known for fundamentalist preachings and frequented by suspects in the Madrid train bombings because the facility was financed by Saudi Arabia, according to an academic expert.

Spanish authorities knew for years that the city’s largest mosque, the Islamic Cultural Centre, adhered to the Wahabi fundamentalist movement sponsored by Saudi Arabia, Islam expert Jesus Nunez told a commission investigating the March 11 bombings yesterday.

Authorities did nothing to monitor the mosque because Saudi Arabia provides Spain with oil, Nunez said.

“Until now the West in general – and Spain as part of it – closed its eyes to what Wahabism means as a rigorous doctrine that violates human rights,” said Nunez, who runs a Madrid think tank called the Institute of Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action.

Spanish investigators have said that key suspects in the bombings that killed 190 people prayed at the mosque. The suspects included Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, an accused ringleader who blew up himself and six other suspects April 3 as police prepared to arrest them.

For years, Spanish authorities have known that Islamic extremists used Spain as a safe haven but did not crack down on them as long as they kept a low profile, Nunez said.

“There was a certain degree of permissiveness,” he said.

Because Spanish authorities rounded up dozens of al-Qaida suspects after the September 11 attacks in 2001, for which Spain served as a staging ground, authorities should have known extremists would strike back, Nunez said.

“From that point on, Spain became part of the battleground,” he said.

Those arrests and Spanish support for pro-western governments of Islamic countries, like Algeria, are more at the root of the March 11 attacks than Spain’s support for the Iraq war, Nunez said.

His comments came after days of testimony from police about the early stages of the bombing investigation and the then-conservative government’s insistence that Basque separatists – not Muslim extremists – were to blame.

Several lawmakers chided the panel for getting bogged down in details and straying from the broader issue of whether the attacks might have been averted.

Much of the testimony in the panel’s first five days of hearings focused on the first piece of evidence suggesting an Islamic link – a van containing seven detonators, traces of explosive and a cassette tape with Quranic verses.

It was found near the rail station from which three of the four bombed trains departed.

Senior police officials testified that despite the government’s initial insistence that the Basque separatist group ETA was to blame, they were wary of the hypothesis.

Officials said a unit specialising in Islamic terror groups had taken over the probe two days after the blasts, even as the government continued insisting ETA was the prime suspect.

The government of then-prime minister Jose Maria Aznar backed the Iraq war despite widespread popular opposition – sending 1,300 soldiers to Iraq – and feared that word of an Islamic link would doom it in elections due in three days. It did.

Socialists won the election, and investigators now blame the bombings on Islamic militants with possible links to al-Qaida.

Also Wednesday, the senior police official to whom the government attributed the first report that the explosives used in the attack were Titadyne – the brand often used by ETA – angrily denied saying that.

The Socialist Party seized on Santiago Cuadra’s comments yesterday to repeat charges that from the outset the government had ample evidence of an Islamic link, lied by blaming ETA and made Cuadra the fall guy.