Explosionswelle erschüttert Madrid

[Merowig]

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Spanish railway bomb linked to Madrid blasts
Railway bomb made of same explosives used in Madrid attack, minister says

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Interior Minister Angel Acebes confirmed today that the bomb found at a high-speed rail line a day earlier was made of the same type of explosives used in the Madrid terror bombings.
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Terrorists can't be bought off - as Spain discovers
(Filed: 03/04/2004)


It is worth taking a moment to consider what might have happened but for the attentiveness of Spain's Civil Guards, who yesterday removed a bomb from an AVE train between Madrid and Seville. Today's newspapers might have been filled with the story of a new carnage, photographs of more weeping relatives, renewed commitments by politicians that such things must never happen again.
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This is a grim conclusion to reach and, not surprisingly, people are periodically tempted to think that they can somehow remove the threat. Spain collectively made such a decision 72 hours after the Madrid bombs, when it voted, in effect, to pull out of the coalition in Iraq.

It would not be entirely fair to say that Spain voted for appeasement - many Spaniards wanted a change anyway, others were angry at what they thought was a government cover-up - but at least some had made the calculation that, by turfing out Jose Maria Aznar's Atlanticist regime, they would make themselves less of a target.

Such an attitude, as has been widely observed inside and outside Spain, is morally wrong. Equally, though, it is intellectually wrong.
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As Kipling put it nearly a hundred years ago: And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
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But governments do not need to respond this way. The Italians did not seek to negotiate with the Red Brigades, nor the Germans with the Baader-Meinhof gang. Indeed, to their credit, the Spanish had traditionally insisted on finding a security rather than a political solution to Eta violence. Though it pains us to say so, the election of March 14 is as much an encouragement to Eta as to al-Qa'eda: they have seen, as have republican and loyalist paramilitaries in this country, that terrorism sometimes works.
Better by far to have replied, with Kipling: "We never pay anyone Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost; for the end of that game is oppression and shame, and the nation that plays it is lost!"

Madrid 2004 scheint jedenfalls fuer mich schon Aehnlichkeiten zu Muenchen 1938 zu haben....


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Spain 'was warned of more attacks'
By Tony Jeffries in Seville
(Filed: 04/04/2004)


An Islamic terror group linked to al-Qa'eda warned Spain after the Madrid train bombings that it would come under fresh attack unless its troops were withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan within four weeks.

A Spanish diplomat confirmed last night that a letter signed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, warning of further attacks on Spanish interests in North Africa and the southern Mediterranean, was sent to the country's embassy in Cairo.
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