Madrid bombings: ETA or... Al Qaeda?

Madrid, this morning.
Several bomb explosions kill at least 173 people, and at least 600 people were injured.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks yet, but two routes are being looked into:

- The ETA: the ETA is a Basque independence-group, politically controlled by the Batasuna party. Batasuna denies all involvement, and points the finger to 'the Arab resistance" (read Al-Qaeda). However, elections in Spain are coming up this weekend, and this could be an ETA-election move. In favor of the ETA though pleas that this attack was huge, even for the ETA.

- Al-Qaeda: Batasuna pointing the finger to Al-Qaeda, Spain's siding with the US in the Iraq-case,...

Update: Spanish police just announced that the type of bombs used is the type of bombs that the ETA tends to use...

My initial thausght would be ETA, but don't they useualy take credit for their bombings?

ETA usually claims responsibility for their bombings, and most of the time even warns about them...

Unless (it seems) the said group know they have struck a serious life threatening blow to the organization. Don't recall Al Quida initialy claiming responsability to all their attacks over the years, especially WTC.

ETC has recently made sever attemps at attacks that were discovered so as mentioned they are likely to be involved and their are elections coming up and this could definitely sway results. Then again the US has reason to site Al Quida involvement being that there is a large population of imagrant Arabs from the Balkins etc.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Basque independence-group has been identified.
Louis XIV: L'étât, c'est moi

That was a joke...

Anyways: 186 people died and still counting, over 1,000 injured.

Wow, I would have to think it is ETA, I can't remember a single time that I was in Spain that a bombing didn't happen in Madrid or Barcelona...If the ETA isn't claiming credit for it (maybe due to the death toll they are a little freightened to?), maybe it was a splinter group?

I guess it COULD be Al Queda, Spain was a pretty big supporter of the US in Iraq, so I guess that at least gives the pretext, but I would definitely look towards ETA or someone associated with ETA...

Al Qaeda and its fellow organisations never supported Saddam. to them he was a enemy of Islam because he was a socialist and formed a socialist form of Diteratorship in Iraq. Al-Qaeida might be behind this but not for Saddam for sure. They might be protesting for the "American occupation of the islamic soil as they call it".

i think Chances of Al-Queida doing this are remote. ETA would be my first suspect. Al-Queida i think has lost its teeths after the Afganisthan war it would take some time before they can regroup.

Remember there is a large islamic imagrent population in spain now so it could be an al-quida type group. from what i understand some of the imagrant groups want to set up islamic law in europ....One other option is that the ETA has lost some control over its troops...they don't useualy go for death tolls this high if it a new rouge faction that can be very bad.

Oh Wolvereen Al-Quida dose have some teeth left, and have hit some targets in africa and south east asia post afganistan they are just a littel disorganized.

Now this gets interesting... a van has been found. In it: bomb mechanisms, and tapes with excerpts from the Koran. Also, an Arab newspaper in London claims to have received a letter from Al-Qaeda taking responsibility for the attacks...

I guess they are bearing their fangs again.....we may have cut off one head but i think we created a hydra.....if they are going to a distributed managment type of organization this will be very hard to deal with

It's no secret that Osam and leaders gave seperatist operating cells the power to carry out their own war. I really don't care who did it, I rank them into the same group called terrorist - who use intimidation to gain favor and force people to their knees. But it is interesting that a cell carried out this operation so I wonder if they masterminded it on their own or had leadership? Or if dirrenet cells are linking up some how. You would think after WTC that they would stop leaving evidence lying around in cars, like the Koran etc. Or maybe they were left their by ETA? :eek:

On a website with inside-information about muslim-terrorism, it is said that the "Lions of Al Mufridoon" took "credit" for the attacks.

Lions of Mufridoon are an unknown terrorist group, and say to have Moroccon, Algerian and Tunesian muslims amongst them.
The website doesn't mention how it knows about this, though...
The site does mention Al Mufridoon's ties to Al-Qaeda.

ck this out

The Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said it had received a claim of responsibility issued in the name of al-Qaida. The e-mail claim, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the newspaper's London offices and said the brigade's "death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain."

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the claim said.

from several sources and AP newswire

I also heard mention of a US attack status report in the van where they found the detonators. I wonder if it's valid or propoganda.

Another possibility is that two terrorist networks are helping each other.

So it could be that ETA has formed links with Al-Qaeda, in much the same way that the IRA in Northern Ireland formed links with Libya, which was obviously involved in terrorist activity.

a possability but Iwould say doubtfull, that would not fit the basqus modes operandi...they tend to be a very nationalistic group

Inocent civilians on their way to work, mass carnage unrelated to government targets. Hitting the people where it hurts and scares the most.... sounds like al-Qa'eda

RoadClosed: exactly, pure al -qa'eda finger print. ETA useualy tries to keep civilian losses t oa minimum and warns of an attack well ahead of time to keep the casulty numbers down. remember you have muslim groups in france and holland trying to take over both countries through legal means and incate koranic law there...its going to get very messy in europ, and some very ugly laws are going to be passed agenst all muslims because of the actions of a few radicals, but what choice do they have?

As you say, this has the Al-Qaeda fingerprint, but on the other hand it fits with previous activity by ETA - i.e. bombing trains & the type of explosives used.

In the past, terrorist groups which have no common ideology have cooperated with each other, as they are both trying to achieve the same objective, which is to overthrow the existing regime.

Trouble is that this works with most governments.
Look at Northern Ireland, where the main political leader of Sinn Fein is a terrorist (ex IRA), and has extracted concession after concession from the UK government without giving anything back in return. Until 9/11 the US fully supported him as well ...

I don't have any interest in Irish politics, but having been injured in an IRA bombing in London I do have a personal interest in this.

I think I'll take a "Texas" attitude on this one.... kill'em all and let God sort'em out. ;)

as you guys are saying this could be any of them ETA or Al-Qaeda , and is true ETA usually just calls to tell us he has put a bomb somewhere, but those bombs were there kill lots of ppl
and even there were bombs to explode after the police and sanitarians came thank they did not explode
live close to madrid and usaully go there every day at that time, and is damn ****ing what they did, i don't care who did it thats should not have happen they were inocents those bastards just dont cabut am not gonna approve more laws to just cut civil rights to just feel more secure because at the end if they want to do harm they'll find a way to do it

this to could be away to make the PP win the elections am not saying that they did god help us, but it helps them.

i'll miss you my friends.

Here is a link from the bbc News site. It seems that the Al-Qaeda link is the strongest so far.

BBC news link Spain

It will be important to see how this effects European politics in the near futur. As Ing said I would be against the rushing through of any new anti terror laws.

An interesting item is there has been a group in France demanding ,for the passed couple of weeks,a ransom or it will start planting bombs on the mainline railways. Since the bomb attack in Spain they have upped the ransom demand.

french rail threats 8 march

BE read for the first batteles in this new jehad in europ, you have holland passing restrictive religious laws out of nesecity, france and germany reliseing that in a few decades the muslim imagrents will be in the majority and are refuseing to assimilate int othe culture..insted they are insisting on trying to replace the goverments, spain is all ready on the short road to talabanesk governence.......its going to get a lot worse, I think the next hit will come from the europeans start looking for mass deportations and removal of religious tolerance laws.

Interesting fact: September 11, 2001 to March 11, 2004 is 911 days... take or give a day :p

OK some one familier with the fundimentalist muslim, what is the significance of the 11 of any give month...that is when the major attacks seem to be happening.

911 is the number we call for help.

No there is mopre...911 means nothing to europeans, besides attackes are not happening on sept 11 but the 11 of any month.......


Or perhaps I am making a basic human logical error and forceing a pattern on coincidence?

I was thinking in terms of the Original Attack, but my feeling is there is absolutely no significance to the attack, just a time picked when all was ready. In fact I don't think they counted on the president to be outside of washington, since it apears there is loose evidence that supports a white house attack. But since the original date was set, it could now hold significance to other factions. I was thinking that 911 is the number you call when something happens so perhaps that saw some humor in the fact that once the attackes began 911 was called all over the country because people from the hijacked planes called it, ground controllers called it etc.

//edit: Since interested I'll add something. If one where to make and assumption that the date could be related in some significance to Islam, it would be important to understand that the Islam calendar is very different. For instance I could relate the Islamic tradition of Ramadan to be the NINTH month in the Islamic Calendar. One could find that very interesting. For instance to a fundamentalist; today could be the year 1425 in terms relative to their separate history. 1425 A.H., to be exact and the month equiv. could be Muharram - Safa with the day being the 25th day of that cycle. So I would be inclined to not limit my analysis to Gregorian based time date calculation.

I doubt that the date was significant, except in the sense that it was done just before the Spanish elections, and as a result affected the outcome, which in itself is highly alarming.
Given that most people in Spain were opposed to the Iraq war, I don't think this was a coincidence.

Most terrorist groups try to be unpredictable to make it more difficult for governments to know when they are going to strike next, which is why you wouldn't choose exactly 911 days after 9/11.

The latest news over here suggests that it is probably a new Islamic group that carried out this atrocity. Firstly because there was apparently none of the usual 'chatter' that is picked up by the intelligence services, and secondly because it was not a suicide bombing.

This is potentially very bad news, because at least a suicide bomber can only do that once, whereas the perpetrators of this are probably still at large.

I am thinking that i was seeing paterns that where not there..any one feel like doing some patern analysis on the known alquida attacks with time and location?

RoadClosed you are correct I was being western centric in my analysis of the attacks...hopefuly the people running around trying to stop al-quida wont make the same mistake.

bballad - I awas analyzing this situation with a western centric view also. Now, I used to be in the intelligence field, so I think your hope should be placed upon the people trying to stop Al-Quida not making the same mistake...er....Too many times. Unfortunantly I speak from experience on this one.

I'll venture this to the discussion. What if it is not 11 (eleven) but II (two - roman numerals) and this refers to the second part of something, such as the restoration of their empire.

gold eagle I would say doubtful on that...but we do know that a sub goal is returning to the glory of the ottomen empire.