Jamal Zougam, Abdelilah Hriz and Othman El Gnaoui, the three 'official' perpetrators of 11-M who are alive.
Six faceless terrorists escaped after killing 193 people and injuring almost 1,900 in the chain of attacks on March 11, 2004, but they left behind their genetic trail.
It seemed impossible for them to be identified.
Today, 18 years after the largest terrorist attack in Western Europe, two of those DNAs that were unknown have a name and surname, another is attributed to an Islamist who refuses to be compared and the other three are suspected of who they are, but without certainty. .
It could be confirmed by Jamal Zougam, Othman El Gnaoui, and Abdelilah Hriz, the only living and located perpetrators.
The others have died killing.
The investigations into 11-M, despite the ruling of October 2007, have continued to advance, always confirming that it was perpetrated by a command of between 10 and 15 radical Islamists mixed with common criminals, who boarded the convoys at the station Alcalá de Henares, they planted 13 bombs, got off at the Vicálvaro bomb and hid in a safe house in Leganés.
And it is confirmed that they did so inspired by Al Qaeda or at the orders of the terrorist organization itself, as Fernando Reinares defends in his book
11-M Al Qaeda's Revenge
.
All under the leadership of Amer Azizi, a Moroccan who was the right hand of Hamza Rabia, head of external operations for Bin Laden's network until a CIA missile killed him in North Waziristan (Pakistan).
The investigations have made it possible to close the identification of eleven participants in the attacks on trains, the attempt to fly an AVE Madrid-Seville on April 2 and in the murder, the following day, of
Geo
Francisco Javier Torronteras when the core of the
Islamist
command
He blew himself up after being surrounded in the safe house on Carmen Martín Gaite street in Leganés.
The first identified were these seven suicides: Serhane Ben Abdelmajid,
the Tunisian
;
Asrih Rifaat Anwar;
Rashid and Mohamed Oulad Akcha;
the military
chief
, Jamal Ahmidan,
el Chino;
Abdennabi Kounjaa and Allekema Lamari, a veteran Algerian terrorist.
By then, Jamal Zougam was already considered a key figure in radical Islamism and the perpetrator of the attack.
To these must be added Mohamed Afallah, the first known and identified escapee, and Othman El Gnaoui, sentenced to 42,922 years in prison as the perpetrator, for helping to bring the dynamite from Asturias, but who was not recognized on the trains, contrary to Zougam.
Neither of them has acknowledged the authorship of it.
Samples were collected from countless people at the crime scenes, of which 20 were considered of interest;
14 had names and surnames when they came to trial.
But six were left faceless.
There were also 218 prints of interest (command prayer books were full), but only 46 were adjudicated.
All men.
THE MADRID CITY COUNCIL ADMITS JIHADIST AUTHORSHIP.
The Madrid City Council has placed a new plaque in honor of the victims of 11-M in the Retiro Remembrance Forest.
In it, the authorship of the attack is attributed to "jihadist terrorism".
This express reference did not originally appear in the commemorative space, created in 2005 by Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, predecessor of José Luis Rodríguez Almeida.
In light, the recently placed plate, and in dark, the one that Gallardón fixed.
J. DUVA
The first unknown vestige that fit was that of the Algerian Daoud Ouhnane.
His fingerprint was found on the Renault Kangoo that was parked the day of the attacks in front of the Alcalá de Henares station, with explosive remains, detonators and a Koranic tape (the first big clue that pointed to radical Islamism).
The police and secret services are convinced that he died fighting in Iraq in 2007.
The breakthrough was the identification of 44-year-old Abdelilah Hirz, alias
Aduljalil
, as one of the terrorists who allegedly placed backpacks on the trains.
His DNA was extracted from the blood that stained a pair of pants in the Morata de Tajuña (Madrid) shack where the murderers set up the bombs and from hair from a comb on the Leganés floor.
After being arrested in Morocco in January 2008, it was found that his DNA was identical to that found on both floors.
Hritz, an electrician and native of Kenitra, was sentenced by an anti-terrorist court in Salé to 20 years for his participation in 11-M.
Judge Juan del Olmo, 11-M instructor, believed that he had then identified another perpetrator: Saad el Husseini, who at 58 is serving a 15-year sentence in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks (May 17, 2003; 43 killed).
Researchers assign him the role of "inventor" of the Madrid backpacks.
Husseini refused to provide a saliva sample to compare his DNA with the anonymous genetic profiles that appeared in Leganés, Vicálvaro and Morata.
Moroccan law protects him from being removed against his will.
The investigators already know that they will never be able to prove the authorship of Othman el Mouhib, Hirz's friend and roommate in Madrid, with whom he was in a hotel in Istanbul before the two made the leap to Iraq, where he ended up dying.
He is one of the official escapees of 11-M.
The fact is that even today there are three genetic profiles of as many men that remain unknown: one was collected from food scraps in Leganés and from a razor blade from Morata;
another left his imprint on clothes in those houses and on a Palestinian handkerchief found in the Renault Kangoo van used by the terrorists to move around with the bombs;
and a third left traces in Morata, the Kangoo and in the Vicálvaro suburban station.
They are not identified, but there are candidates.
For example, according to the version of the attacks by
jihadist
Kamal Ahbar, the perpetrators were the seven from Leganés, Afalah, Ouhnane (who planted two bombs in this story) and Elía el Harouchi, of whom there has been no further news.
This Islamist, like almost all those investigated and interrogated, wanted nothing to do with Amer Azizi, considered the key to linking Al Qaeda in Pakistan with the Madrid attacks.
If the role of Azizi, nicknamed
Otman Al Andalusi or Abu Jaafar al Magrebi
, were true, so would be that of Abdelkarim Mejjati,
Abu Elías,
the presumed mastermind of the Casablanca attacks (so similar structurally and in number of terrorists to 11-M ), but his DNA was not in Madrid.
And he's dead, like most train bombers.
Zougam, El Gnaoui or Hriz can still clear everything up.
All three deny any involvement in the attacks and the dead do not speak.
Amer Azizi, in Afghanistan.
On the left, his corpse.
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