Madrid bombing trial gets underway

Twenty-nine defendants sat on one side of the heavily guarded courtroom Thursday, most of them shielded by bulletproof glass. A few yards away sat some 50 victims: angry, somber survivors and families of the nearly 200 dead.

And so began the trial in Europe’s largest act of Islamist terrorism, a controversial and fraught effort to punish the guilty and answer questions that continue to roil society in Spain and throughout the continent.

On March 11, 2004, bombs planted by suspected Islamic militants ripped through four commuter trains during Madrid’s morning rush hour, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,800. It was the first time Al Qaeda-linked attacks had hit European soil, and the strikes shed new light on the existence of militant networks prepared to commit egregious violence.

The carnage traumatized a thriving nation and upended Spanish politics. Many here hope the trial will somehow help heal the scars.

Thursday’s proceedings, televised live to a transfixed nation, opened with the questioning of a key defendant often portrayed as a mastermind of the attacks. Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, an Egyptian, was arrested in Milan three months after the bombings, and he purportedly boasted of his role.

Ahmed, dressed in jeans and an off-white jacket, took the stand in the hushed courtroom and, for several hours, refused to answer questions from prosecutors. Later, however, he agreed to respond to his attorney and denied responsibility for the bombings.

“Your honor, I never had any relation to the events which occurred in Madrid,” he testified.

“Obviously I condemn these attacks unconditionally and completely. This is a conviction I have very clearly and absolutely,” he said in Arabic. “I have never had any ties to Al Qaeda nor to any Islamic organization.... Thank God, I am a Muslim, but I practice my religion in a normal way, not an extremist way.”

Also known as Mohammed the Egyptian, Ahmed is one of three men prosecutors accuse of planning and organizing the attacks. Seven of the principal suspects killed themselves three weeks after the bombings, blowing up their suburban Madrid apartment building as police closed in.

Most of the people standing trial are North African Muslims; nine are non-Muslim Spaniards. Charges include mass murder, terrorist association and supplying the explosives used to blow up the trains.

Law enforcement authorities have long considered Ahmed a key suspect, both in the Madrid bombings and in the building of networks used to recruit and send Islamic militants from Europe to Iraq.

Italian law enforcement authorities who tracked Ahmed for months before arresting him bugged his apartment and intercepted his phone calls and e-mails. In one intercept, according to transcripts included in the indictment, he praised the Madrid suspects who died as “martyrs” and wished he could join them.

“The entire Madrid operation was mine,” he tells a colleague. “The thread of the operation in Madrid was mine, you understand? The trains ... “

Prosecutors hold that conversation up as a confession. In court Thursday, Ahmed’s attorney, Endika Zulueta, asked that the recordings of the intercepted statements be provided to an interpreter working for the defense so the translations could be verified. Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez agreed to the request.

In an interview before the trial, Zulueta suggested that he would challenge the authenticity and probative value of the wiretaps.

“Rabei Osman became one of the most watched people in 21st century Europe. He was living like in ‘Big Brother,’ ” Zulueta said. And yet, the lawyer argued, police produced only a handful of potentially incriminating snippets.

Survivors and relatives who entered the courtroom, in smaller numbers than expected, said they felt a rush of contradictory emotions, from relief that the trial had finally begun to doubt about whether their anguish could be assuaged or their quest for justice sated.

Pilar Manjon, whose 20-year-old son was killed in the bombings and who heads a victims group, said the trial represented “a small ray of light.”

She said seeing the defendants made her “legs tremble.”

“You are afraid, you relive it, looking in the eyes of those who in one day destroyed your life,” she said outside the courthouse.

Inside, however, Manjon made a point of standing, long after the rest of the audience sat to await the beginning of the trial, and of staring hard at the suspects.

“I want them to remember my face, because I am going to be their worst nightmare,” she later told reporters.

The trial is expected to last four to six months, with the three-judge panel expected to deliver its verdicts in the fall. The size of the undertaking is enormous: More than 600 witnesses and 100 experts are to be called to testify, and the indictment and supporting documents run more than 90,000 pages.

The defendants facing the most serious charges, including Ahmed, if convicted could receive sentences totaling nearly 39,000 years because of multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. Under Spanish law, however, the sentence would be capped at 40 years. There is no death penalty in Spain.

Spaniards know they are in the spotlight with this trial, and authorities said they were confident the judiciary was up to the task. European courts in general have had a hard time convicting alleged terrorists.

Perhaps more difficult to gauge is whether the trial will help soothe a bruised nation. Three days after the bombings, voters ousted the center-right government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and gave an upset victory to the Socialist Party -- partly out of anger over Aznar’s handling of the attacks and his earlier decision to send Spanish troops to Iraq, which some believe made Spain vulnerable to Islamic militancy.

Today, the country remains sorely divided, even over some of the details of the bombings.

“There are too many unknowns,” legislator Gustavo de Aristegui, of Aznar’s Popular Party, said Thursday.

“Either through this trial or through other means we will end up finding out everything. Not just because it’s healthy and honors the memory of the victims, but because it is the sacred right of a democracy to know the truth.”

wilkinson@latimes.com

Times staff writer Wilkinson reported from Atlanta and special correspondent Mateo-Yanguas from Madrid.