The Spanish government called for calm as troops and police patrolled potential targets after a series of bombings and a purported al-Qaeda threat to create rivers of blood in Spain.
Frontpage newspaper pictures yesterday showed combat troops guarding a dam, adding to the feeling of a country under siege.
Police were deployed on Madrid's metro on Monday, a job normally left to private guards, and troops were dotted along the route of the high-speed Madrid-Seville rail line that was the target of a foiled bomb attack last week.
Spain has ramped up security since 191 people were killed when suspected Islamic militants bombed four commuter trains in Madrid on March 11.
Up to six of the suspected train bombers blew themselves up on Saturday during a police siege in a suburb of the city, killing one police officer.
The government says they had been planning further attacks.
Police, who returned to the site yesterday to continue the search for clues and remains, say a handful of accomplices remain at large.
"There could have been a series of Holy Week bombings, probably starting this weekend," a source close to the investigation said, adding that police were unsure how much of an arsenal remained in the fugitives' hands.
Interior Minister Angel Acebes tried to reassure people.
"We must all maintain the greatest calm and allow the security forces to act," Acebes said on state radio on Monday, adding there had been "quite a few false alarms" during the day. "All possible measures have been taken in places considered especially sensitive. There is a big deployment of security forces, including Civil Guard, national police and the army."
Investigators are analyzing a letter purportedly from the militant al-Qaeda network to ABC newspaper threatening more bombs unless Spain withdraws troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"If our demands are not satisfied, we declare war and we swear by Almighty God that we will turn your country into an inferno and we will make blood flow like rivers," the letter said, according to an ABC Spanish translation.
The Interior Ministry said it gave some credence to the letter, and ABC said yesterday that police were comparing it with documents found in the apartment raided on Saturday to compare handwriting.
El Mundo said police had found two machineguns in the apartment of the same type as those carried by militants in a video claiming responsibility for the train attacks.
Spanish authorities announced another arrest in the Madrid train bombings on Monday. Sixteen people are now in custody.
The militants who blew themselves up as police surrounded their apartment in the suburb of Leganes included at least three named on international arrest warrants for the March 11 attacks.
El Mundo newspaper said one of them, dubbed "El Tunecino" (The Tunisian), had been reported to police by his landlord on March 8 after he disappeared without paying his rent.
"The police told me they couldn't do anything, his papers were in order," it quoted the landlord as saying.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the