The investigation of the 11-M attacks is probably one of the most analyzed and questioned in history, despite its effectiveness and success.
A separate conversation with three of the police investigators who were in charge of the investigations those days—and who prefer to remain anonymous 20 years later—reveals the pressures they suffered, the overwhelm of those days, the errors and the successes. , and the loose fringes that remained.
The first hours.
After hearing on the radio, on the way to the police station, that an explosion had occurred in Atocha, early that Thursday, March 11, 2004, the General Information Commissariat (CGI) began to be attentive and prepared.
“But initially only that, because those who carried out the first procedures were those from the Madrid provincial brigade,” remembers one of the group leaders.
“We became progressively aware of the dimension of the attack [192 dead and 2,000 injured], as news arrived through the media and from colleagues,” he says.
“Both those from the Islamic terrorism section and those from the ETA group began to look at the phones that we had tapped, conversations, surveillance… Nothing came out,” he recalls.
TEDAX information.
"I remember that as soon as we arrived at those Dantesque scenarios, with a river of zombies that we were trying to guide by marking an exit, I told my people: 'We have to organize this, we have to check thing by thing, bag by bag.'
And one said: 'We do it manually, boss;
If not, it is impossible.”
The agents specializing in the deactivation of explosives (TEDAX) worked bareback and risking their own safety at ground zero.
They had exploded, almost simultaneously, between 7:36 and 7:40, ten of the 13 bombs that the terrorists placed on four commuter trains that covered the line between Alcalá de Henares (a Madrid municipality in the southeast of the region) and the Atocha station. , in Madrid.
In Alcalá de Henares, the perpetrators of the massacre had left a white Kangoo van.
“That day the cameras at the station did not work,” laments the commissioner, “but our theory is that in batches of four they boarded the trains that were passing, minutes apart and with their respective explosive bags, which would have ended to prepare in the van.
"I think they carried the explosives in the back and the detonators and cell phones in front, to avoid risks, and that they were placing them in the explosive mass shortly before leaving to leave the bags on the trains."
The Kangoo van.
The van was found around 10:00 and inspected hours later.
Seven more detonators were found in it, “which they must have carried as spares, in case a cable came loose from one of the telephones.”
“When the alarm goes off at the scheduled time, they would explode,” explains a commissioner.
Also found in that van, which did not have a false license plate (as vehicles used by ETA usually had), was a tape with Koranic chants and the remains of a Goma2-ECO dynamite cartridge, which matched the characteristics of the (white) explosive found. in the two backpacks that did not explode at the El Pozo and Atocha stations.
“It was already known from the first hours that Titadyne could not be, because it is reddish in color, and in addition the damage caused pointed to a much more powerful and faster explosive,” adds the commissioner.
First appearances.
The main political leaders, led by the president, José María Aznar (PP), and the Minister of the Interior, Ángel Acebes, appeared on television from early in the morning and maintained that the main hypothesis was that it was the work of ETA.
Arnaldo Otegi denied them.
The newspapers prepared their first pages, also in the evening, with photos of the horror and some, like EL PAÍS, received calls around midday on March 11 from the President of the Government himself, who claimed that ETA was behind the massacre.
A fax was even sent to the Spanish embassies abroad with that thesis.
Appearance of the then Minister of the Interior, Ángel Acebes, in La Moncloa after attending the crisis Cabinet meeting due to the 11-M attacks.
Miguel Gener
A backpack bomb at the police station.
Meanwhile, TEDAX agents and basic police officers entered the scenes of the attacks to collect all kinds of remains with their hands, to separate and stack what was being examined.
This is how a backpack bomb arrived at the Vallecas police station, “amongst many other belongings of the travelers collected, and which had previously passed through the Ifema facilities, because initially they told us to take them there.
Fortunately, the backpack's detonation system failed and it never exploded,” the commissioner recalls, still with relief.
That was the famous backpack that caused so much talk among those who, maintaining that it was false evidence
deliberately
planted , embraced the theory that ETA was behind the brutal attacks.
By then the police had verified that there had not been any bomb warning calls that the gang usually made.
Diana of the conspiracy theorists.
The then head of the TEDAX, Juan Jesús Sánchez Manzano, and the then commissioner of Vallecas, Rodolfo Ruiz, became the target of conspiracy theorists, who accused them of hiding evidence that pointed to ETA and even of hiding "the backpack." ” in the kitchen of his house.
Both suffered brutal professional smear campaigns for years.
Sánchez Manzano had to settle for being commissioner of Móstoles until his retirement.
Ruiz suffered a stroke and his wife ended up committing suicide because she could not withstand so much pressure.
Both sued several media outlets for insults, but no judge condemned these media outlets, citing freedom of expression.
Two lines of investigation open to Leganés.
“From the moment the explosive is found in the bags that did not explode and the detonators and the tape in the van, the two investigation groups are activated: the UCIE (Central Foreign Information Unit, responsible for Islamist terrorism) and that of the UCII (the Central Internal Information Unit, focused on ETA),” remembers one of the bosses.
“And both remained active until the explosion of the Leganés apartment [on April 3].
The two groups got there separately, because the political leaders wanted to find links with ETA and avoid friction with the Government,” he says.
Several police officers remember the visit that Ángel Acebes made to the General Information Commissariat, where they gave him all kinds of explanations about what was already the main line of investigation, the jihadist authorship, and the “general astonishment” at his subsequent appearance. before the media, maintaining ETA's thesis.
Terrorist claims.
Al Qaeda claims responsibility for the attack twice.
First by letter, sent to the usual newspaper used for the jihadist organization's communications,
Al Quds Al Arabi
in London, on the 12th. It justifies the attack "due to the settling of accounts with Spain."
And the next day the terrorists leave a recording on a video tape inside a trash can near the M-30 mosque and notify Telemadrid: “It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies,” says a Arabic spokesperson.
For its part, ETA, in another statement sent to the newspaper
Gara
, reiterates that it had nothing to do with the attacks.
The investigators are clear about the line of investigation to follow, “but the bosses keep that of the terrorist group open,” says another investigator.
Rivalries between judges.
“The judge on duty on March 11 was Juan del Olmo,” recalls one of the investigators, “who was responsible for opening the proceedings.
However, Judge Baltasar Garzón was the one who until then had led all the jihadism investigations.”
In the 14 months after the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001, there had already been 40 arrests of Islamists in Spain.
"For this reason, Garzón asked us to bring everything to him, and then Del Olmo called us to ask us for the same thing, but we told him that it was part of the summary and that we had already given it to Garzón, so he should ask him .
They did not understand each other, we were constantly between the two, with an enormous amount of work to do.
You couldn't work like that,” remembers one of the group leaders.
“The culmination of those strange judicial relations was provided by Magistrate Teresa Palacios, on April 3, when we located Leganés's apartment: she was the one on duty that day, but we caught her playing golf,” says the same agent.
“Later she was reluctant to pass the matter on to Del Olmo.”
Accelerated course in telephony.
"But the investigation itself began on March 12, with the SIM card that had been found in Vallecas' backpack," the agents emphasize.
While Spain took to the streets in dismay asking “Who was it?”, the investigators followed the trail of the card to a booth run by Indians in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés.
“They had sold it on February 24, in a package of one hundred cards,” recalls the commissioner.
“We had to arrest the Indians for not wanting to collaborate with justice, and they ended up saying that they had sold them to another parlor, called Nuevo Siglo, which was the one run by Jamal Zougam,” an old acquaintance of the investigators.
Zougam had escaped from the Dátil anti-jihadist operation (in November 2001), “when it was judicially considered that there was not enough evidence against him.”
From that moment on, the investigation is "directed" by an inspector who receives an accelerated course from the head of security at Amena, the telephone company to which the cards belonged, and who "leaves their eyes" - the authors agree. interviewed—crossing data from cards, telephones and repeater towers, to provide locations to researchers.
“The urgency was maximum: the signal left by an active card in the radio space disappeared after 72 hours.”
Five arrested.
The first five arrested, on the same day the 13th, were the two Indians and three Moroccans, among whom was Zougam.
Spain is experiencing a day of reflection that day, prior to the election, very turbulent, with the PP headquarters besieged by thousands of people who protest believing they have been deceived by the Government.
Hours lost with press releases.
"Until March 11 there was a maxim: 'the Police never respond to press information.'
But, suddenly, we found ourselves having to assign group leaders to respond to news that was published.
Our superiors said: 'They ask for it from above,' says one of the researchers.
“There were people who had to spend many hours writing notes, instead of dedicating themselves to research, so that they could be used later by the commanders and politicians on duty,” he says.
“And many were useless because then they said what they thought,” he adds.
While the information agents slept in the hallways of the police station for a few hours to be able to continue working, the politicians measured their public appearances as polling time approached.
House located between Morata de Tajuña and Chinchón (Madrid) in which the police found evidence that showed that the 3/11 terrorists set up and activated the bombs there the afternoon before the attack.
The connections of Morata de Tajuña.
“One of the cards that Zougam had purchased was activated, along with seven others, on the same day the 12th, in a receiver in Morata de Tajuña,” a commissioner continues the story.
That property in Morata turned out to be the same one that Serhane Ben Abdelmajid had rented on a previous occasion,
The Tunisian
, a graduate in Economics and a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 90s, an outstanding disciple of Abu Dahdah and later of Mustafa el Maimouni, to who had precisely rented that house in 2002. “In January 2004 the house had been rented by Jamal Ahmidan,
El Chino
, who had arrived from Morocco very radicalized and came educated and with contacts,” recalls the commissioner.
They had been there the day before the 11-M attacks and returned there, to reorganize, the day after.
That was their headquarters, where they had prepared the explosives: “We know this because all the telephone numbers coincide there on that day the 10th.”
Off the radar.
Until that day El Chino was not on the radar of the intelligence services.
But yes in those of the Judicial Police, where he was a known drug trafficker.
“The data was not cross-checked because, until that moment, it was not understood that jihadists could have a relationship with drug trafficking, since it went against their religion,” explains the commissioner.
Drugs turned out to be the source of his financing, however.
And also the way in which they paid Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who supplied them with the explosives from the Avilés mine.
A confidant and a trip to Asturias.
“On March 18, the TEDAX informed us that the explosive was nationally manufactured, from an Asturian factory, and three investigators went there: one from Islam, another from ETA and one from the CNI who has joined,” continues the commissar.
"At the factory they tell us that they have sold the explosive to Mina Conchita, in Avilés, precisely from where we had detected that several calls had been made from a booth to one of the telephone numbers on the cards."
“A Civil Guard confidant, named Rafa Zouhier, had put El Chino in contact with Trashorras, both drug traffickers, to close the deal, a few months before, in a cafeteria located in front of the Gómez Ulla Hospital,” says the investigator.
“That information, which a second lieutenant from the armed institute had received, also went unnoticed because no one associated drug traffickers with jihadism,” he comments.
“At that moment we already knew that they had bought 200 kilos of dynamite and that they could have almost half of it left.
We had to find them to avoid another massacre,” he says.
At that point, a week after the attack, the Government decided to involve the Army in the anti-terrorist alert.
Albolote and the Alhambra.
“On April 1 we learned that they had rented an apartment in Albolote, 20 minutes from Granada,” recalls the commissioner.
"But when we arrive there is nothing, it is a safe house: my theory has always been that they wanted to attack the cathedral or the church inside the Alhambra, to comply with AlQaeda's classic and repeated demands to recover Al Andalus," he says. he.
The police, in desperation, distribute photos of six suspects involved in the 11-M massacre in search and capture.
Leganés, an investigation that blew up.
Finally, on April 3, they located the apartment in Leganés (Madrid) thanks to the fact that another of the cards led the investigators to a real estate agency and the owner recognized the photo of one of the wanted people.
“Is there anyone inside?” I ask the inspector as he hurriedly tries to eat a squid sandwich.
To find out, the inspector comes and calls the phone with the excuse that he has gone to the wrong floor.
Someone with an Arabic accent answers.
'Yes, there is someone inside, boss,' the inspector answers me," recalls this investigator.
“An operation was immediately set up, and agents from the two groups that were continuing the investigation went there separately: those of Islamists and those of ETA,” adds one of the investigators: “We placed a group on each side of the building.
We saw one of them, Abdelmajid Bouchar, leave.
He sees us because he catches us all there, setting up the operation.
He runs away, warns those on the floor and a shot is fired from above.
From that moment on, everything accelerates.
“We began to receive calls from our counterparts in Morocco and Tunisia to warn us that the terrorists are saying goodbye to their families: they are going to commit suicide, but we still don't know how many there are or who they are,” he says.
“Someone gave the order for the GEO to enter, but why?” he asks.
“Something could have been tried before, negotiating, dividing their wills... A couple of bodies appeared under two beds, which indicates that not everyone wanted to die...”, reflects the researcher.
“The fact that it was blown up meant that our investigation was also blown up, we were left without command and with many questions still unanswered, which would fuel the conspiracies: who devised the attacks, who thought of doing it on the trains, how They planned it.
We had not found anything, not a sketch, not a list of train schedules, nothing related to the planning of the attack in any record,” he analyzes.
But someone gave the order to enter.
With the explosion of the house, GEO agent Francisco Javier Torrenteras was injured, who died hours later.
After arduous work by the Scientific Police and a trickle of analyzed human remains that lasted days, it was possible to identify seven other members of the command, among whom were the alleged inspirers: Maimouni (his fingerprints appeared in a book) and Allekema Lamari , of which a viscera was found.
Bouchar was arrested on a train in Serbia in 2005. The 2007 trial at the National Court served to corroborate the police investigation down to its smallest details.
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