Pubdate: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Company Page: A - 12 Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388 Author: Dale Fuchs, New York Times Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism) DRUG MONEY PAID FOR ATTACKS ON TRAINS, SPAIN SAYS News Conference Describes Alleged Planning by Suspects Madrid - The Islamic extremists responsible for the Madrid train bombings financed their plot with sales of hashish and ecstasy and drank holy water from Mecca in ritual "purification acts" before the attacks, the acting interior minister, Angel Acebes, said Wednesday. In a final news conference before the newly elected Socialist government takes office, Acebes described the March 11 terror attacks as a local, independently organized operation led by people with "connections to other fundamentalist groups in Europe and outside Europe." He said the group might have been influenced by a supreme leader "with more experience with radical Islam" and possibly training in Afghanistan. But he said much of the plot had been carried out with the help of petty criminals. Using common drug traffickers as intermediaries, Acebes said, the bombers swapped the ecstasy and hashish for the 440 pounds of dynamite used in the blasts that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,400 others in the Spanish capital. Money from the drug trafficking paid for an apartment hideout, a car and the cell phones that were used to detonate the bombs, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. The explosives, Acebes added, were taken from a coal mine in the Asturias region of northern Spain and transported in a Volkswagen to a run-down property outside Madrid, where they were assembled as bombs and placed in backpacks. The leaders of the operation, evidently concerned about the effects of their plot on their souls, "swallowed holy water from Mecca," Acebes said, adding: "They met periodically to carry out purification acts that would legitimize the committing of acts that could offend Islam." Acebes said the man in charge of the group's finances was Jamal Ahmidan, a 33-year-old Moroccan immigrant with an "extensive criminal record for drug trafficking." Ahmidan was identified as one of seven suspects who blew themselves up on April 3 in a Leganes apartment building, in suburban Madrid, rather than turn themselves in to police. At least three bodies have not yet been identified. Acebes said the ideological mastermind of the bombing, and leader of the purification ceremonies, was Moroccan immigrant Jamal Zougam, 30. Zougam was one of 18 people sent to prison since the bombings -- most of them Moroccan -- he said. Zougam was mentioned but not charged in an indictment by an investigating judge, Baltasar Garzon, in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon. Acebes said the operational chief and coordinator of the bombings was a 37-year-old Tunisian named Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, a former economics student at Madrid's Autonomous University who worked for a real estate office and was married to a 17-year-old Moroccan woman. Fakhet "recruited participants at some of the Madrid mosques in which he led some of the prayers, " Acebes said. He was killed in the Leganes explosion, which also left one police officer dead. All those responsible for the attacks are either behind bars or dead, Acebes said. The piece of the puzzle still missing, however, is whether a supreme leader, or "emir," oversaw the operation from a distance, Acebes said. "We can't rule out that someone both with better training in Islam and experience in Afghanistan or preparation in other territories could have also had an influence on this cell," Acebes said. "We can't rule out that this person was one of the people who died in Leganes." Investigators suspect that Amer el-Azizi, a Moroccan wanted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks as well as last year's suicide bombings in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, may be that "emir," but evidence has not yet surfaced, the Interior Ministry spokesman said. Six suspects arrested over the past week have yet to go before a judge. A fugitive Bosnian suspect named by the Interior Ministry, Sanel Sjekirica, 23, said from Sweden on Wednesday that he would turn himself in to the Spanish authorities this weekend. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake