Bomb accused 'warned police about suspects'

A Spanish man suspected of supplying explosives to the Madrid bombers told a court he had tipped police off months before the attacks that some of the Moroccan suspects in the case were looking to buy explosives.

Former miner Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, 30, is suspected of having supplied the dynamite used in the 2004 bombings, in which 191 people were killed.

Trashorras said today that at the end of October 2003, some five months before the attacks, police “came to ask me exclusively about explosives and I gave them information about Jamal Ahmidan and Rafa Zouhier.”

Ahmidan was one of seven key suspects who killed themselves after being surrounded by police three weeks after the train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Zouhier is charged with being a middle man in the sale of explosives between the alleged Islamic extremist cell that carried the attacks and the Spaniards who supposedly sold them.

Trashorras, a former police informer, admitted buying hashish off Ahmidan but denied he knew the Moroccan had any plans to carry out attacks.

“If I had known that I would have advised (police),” said Trashorras, one of 29 suspects, mostly Moroccans, on trial for the bombings.

On the first day of his court testimony yesterday, Trashorras denied having supplied the explosives used in the massacre, saying the accusations sounded like something out of “a movie plot”.

If convicted, he faces jail terms of 30 years for each of the killings and 18 years each for 1,820 attempted murders, but under Spanish law the maximum time anyone can serve for a terrorist conviction is 40 years.

His brother-in-law and wife are also charged in the case with collaboration.

The trial continues.