Ten bombs in four minutes
On the morning of 11 March 2004, ten explosive devices detonated across four separate commuter trains in Madrid within a span of about three minutes, between 8:37 and 8:40. The bombs used Goma-2 ECO explosives packed into backpacks, triggered remotely using mobile phone detonators, a method that allowed the attackers to set off multiple devices across different trains without needing to be present at the moment of detonation themselves. This coordinated, multi-location design, striking several trains simultaneously during the peak of the morning commute, was intended to maximise both casualties and disruption to the city’s transport network at the point in the day when the trains would be carrying the largest possible number of passengers.
One hundred ninety-three dead
The attacks killed 193 people and injured approximately 2,500 others, making this the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried out in Spain’s history. The scale of casualties reflected both the number of devices used and their placement inside crowded commuter carriages during rush hour, a combination that produced a death toll far exceeding most previous terrorist attacks in Western Europe up to that point. The sheer number of injured, alongside the dead, placed enormous immediate strain on Madrid’s emergency medical services, which had to manage a mass-casualty event unfolding simultaneously across four different locations within the city’s rail network rather than a single, contained incident.
A local cell, not a central al-Qaeda operation
Responsibility for the bombings lay not with a centrally directed international terrorist operation but with a loosely organised local network. Investigating judge Juan del Olmo identified the perpetrators as a mixed group of Moroccan, Syrian, and Algerian extremists, describing them as local cells of Islamist extremists radicalised largely through the internet rather than operatives acting under direct organisational control from al-Qaeda’s central leadership. Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan mobile phone shop owner, was among those later convicted, receiving a sentence, calculated under Spanish sentencing conventions, equivalent to 42,922 years in prison for 191 counts of murder, a formally striking figure even though actual time served under Spanish law is capped well below that nominal total.
The government points at ETA
The Spanish government’s initial public response focused squarely on ETA, the Basque separatist organisation responsible for previous attacks within Spain. Interior Minister Ángel Acebes pointed in unambiguous terms toward ETA on the day of the bombings, even as investigators began pursuing other lines of inquiry by the day’s end. This attribution came under increasing strain as new evidence emerged: by 13 March, two days after the attack, three Moroccan and two Indian suspects had been arrested, and a videotape in which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks had surfaced publicly, developments that directly contradicted the government’s earlier and more confident public statements blaming Basque separatists for an attack that increasingly appeared to have a very different origin.
Millions march, then the anger turns
Public reaction to the attacks unfolded in two distinct phases. On 12 March, government-organised demonstrations condemning terrorism drew an extraordinary turnout, with more than eleven million people, some twenty-eight percent of Spain’s entire population, participating nationwide, including over two million in Madrid alone. The following day, 13 March, a different and more spontaneous kind of protest broke out once evidence pointing away from ETA had become widely public, with crowds gathering at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol specifically to express anger at the Aznar government, banging pots, pans, and dustbin lids in visible frustration at what many now perceived as an attempt to manage public perception of the attack’s true origin ahead of the imminent election.
An election decided three days later
The general election, already scheduled for 14 March, took place just three days after the bombings, and the result surprised many observers: the Socialist Party’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defeated Prime Minister Aznar’s governing Popular Party. Analysis by the Real Instituto Elcano concluded that the government’s handling of the ETA attribution, and the widespread perception that officials had sought to obscure a connection between the attack and Spain’s unpopular military involvement in Iraq, likely cost Aznar’s party the election outright. Roughly a million voters are estimated to have switched their electoral choice in the attack’s aftermath, with about twenty-eight percent of voters reporting that the bombings had directly influenced how they ultimately cast their ballot.