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MADRID-A Spanish court absolved four men and upheld the acquittal of a fifth on Thursday in the convoluted legal proceedings relating to the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings that killed 191 people in the deadliest attack by Islamic militants on European soil.The rulings followed appeals of some of 21 convictions by a lower court after a five-month trial that ended in October. Seven other people were acquitted at that time.Most dramatically, the court on Thursday upheld the acquittal of one of the bombing’s accused masterminds,Rabei Osman, an Egyptian, who was found guilty in 2006 in Italy of belonging to a terrorist organization.Mr. Osman was arrested in Italy in June 2004, but disputed prosecution evidence citing wiretaps in which he was purported to have said he had conceived the idea of the attacks.With the bulk of the convictions upheld and few channels of appeal now left available to those sentenced, some survivors said they saw Thursday’s decisions as moving toward the closure one of the most painful episodes in Spain’s modern history.“No matter how many convictions or how long the sentences it will seem insufficient to those of us who lost life and limb, but I believe it closes an important chapter that needed closure,” said Jesús Ramírez, the former vice president of the bombing victims’ association, a survivor of the attack whose body was severely burned and riddled with shrapnel on a 7:36 a.m. commuter train from the town of El Pozo on March 11, 2004. The attack was one of several near simultaneous blasts on four commuter trains that day.Mr. Ramírez said he was sorry that Mr. Osman’s verdict was not overturned. “It would have been the most logical, correct thing to do,” he said in a telephone interview. “In the measure that justice is done, it helps the society to heal.”In an emotional, five-month trial ending last October and involving 50 lawyers and 350 witnesses, the Spanish high court, the Audiencia Nacional, convicted 21 defendants in connection with the rail bombings.But it absolved three of the top suspects, including Mr. Osman.He as absolved on the grounds that he was already serving a sentence in Italy for the same crime. Terrorism experts said that verdict illustrated the difficulty of building a solid case against suspected Islamists when they belong to a diffuse group with local foot soldiers and no formal structure.Prosecutors appealed the decision against Mr. Osman, alleging that he had filed for an appeal in Italy and could eventually be acquitted, making it possible for him to be tried in Spain.In its ruling Thursday, the higher court agreed with this reasoning but still acquitted him, saying that prosecutors had not produced enough evidence against Mr. Osman.“The presentation of the facts contains an affirmation of such a general nature that it is not sufficient to establish his belonging to determined organization or terrorist group,” the 959-page ruling read. The evidence, it added, “was reduced to the mention of a telephone conversation between the accused and a third person,” which the court deemed “clearly insufficient.”Thursday’s ruling also reversed the acquittal of a Spaniard, Antonio Toro, who was purported to have supplied explosives used in the attack. He was sentenced to four years in prison.The vast trial against the suspects resuscitated conspiracy theories about the author of the attack, with some conservative political activists, media outlets and victims groups claiming that the Basque terrorist group Eta was involved.The government of former Prime Minister José Maria Aznar had at first blamed Eta for the bombings, despite mounting evidence that pointed to a Madrid-based group of Islamist radicals from Morocco who used drug money to finance the attack. This insistence is seen by many political activists as the reason Mr. Aznar’s party lost national elections days after the attack.“The sentence confirms 100 percent that the nucleus of the March 11 attacks was an Islamic group that had the help of a group of Spaniards,” said a spokeswoman for the high court.The four men whose convictions were quashed were Basel Ghalyoun, Mouhannad Almallah Dabas, Abdelilah el Fadual al Akil and Raúl González.They had been convicted to terms of 5 to 12 years on lesser offenses.Another convicted mastermind, Othman el Gnaoui, was cleared of a lesser charge of falsification of an official document but remained in jail on more serious charges of helping to transport the explosives used in the attacks.The bombings in 2004 injured more than 1,800 people and offered Europeans chilling evidence of their vulnerability after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.In London on July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters in attacks on three subway trains and a bus.By DALE FUCHS
As in the days of Noah....
