Fresh links between last month's Madrid bomb attacks and the UK emerged on Sunday after it was reported that terror suspects telephoned the UK shortly before blowing themselves up 11 days ago.
At least one call to the UK was made while seven people were surrounded by police in an apartment building in the Madrid dormitory town of Leganes, according to police sources quoted by El Pais newspaper on Sunday.
No details were given of the conversation, which would have taken place during the two hours between the start of the siege and its dramatic end.
The identity of the person who received the call is also not known, with police sources speculating it might have been a "spiritual leader."
"This reinforces suspicions that the terrorists who have been active in Spain receive support from Britain," El Pais said.
The newspaper said investigators believed the recipient of the phone call was a radical preacher who had fallen out with moderate Muslim leaders. They said information on him was, at best, sketchy.
Previous reports in Spanish newspapers have suggested that several members of the group phoned relatives to say goodbye before they blew themselves up when police started to attack the apartment.
The call to the UK, therefore, could also have been to say farewell to family.
The commissioner of the London-based Metropolitan police, Sir John Stevens, has suggested there might be links between al-Qaeda supporters in the UK and the Madrid attacks, and Scotland Yard has sent detectives to Madrid to liaise with the investigating officers.
Last month detectives raided four homes in the East End of London and one in the north-west of the capital based on information received from the Spanish authorities. There were no arrests.
Spanish forensic scientists have, so far, identified four of the corpses found among the wreckage of the Leganes apartment -- some of which carried suicide bomb belts.
Three of those men appear in a video, made a week before their deaths, that survived the bomb blast, according to El Pais.
On the tape they threatened further attacks in Spain if troops were not pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Spanish interior minister, Angel Acebes, has said that British police are helping with the investigation.
Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric being held without charge in the UK, has been linked to violence in Spain -- but could not have been the recipient of the call from Leganes.
An investigating magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, named Qatada as "a member of Osama bin Laden's infrastructure" in a case he has brought against more than a dozen people accused of, among other things, involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks in the US.
His indictment also charged two UK-based Islamists, who use the names Shakur and Abu Abdulrahman, with involvement in Sept. 11.
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
HISTORIC: After the arrest of Kim Keon-hee on financial and political funding charges, the country has for the first time a former president and former first lady behind bars South Korean prosecutors yesterday raided the headquarters of the former party of jailed former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol to gather evidence in an election meddling case against his wife, a day after she was arrested on corruption and other charges. Former first lady Kim Keon-hee was arrested late on Tuesday on a range of charges including stock manipulation and corruption, prosecutors said. Her arrest came hours after the Seoul Central District Court reviewed prosecutors’ request for an arrest warrant against the 52-year-old. The court granted the warrant, citing the risk of tampering with evidence, after prosecutors submitted an 848-page opinion laying out
North Korean troops have started removing propaganda loudspeakers used to blare unsettling noises along the border, South Korea’s military said on Saturday, days after Seoul’s new administration dismantled ones on its side of the frontier. The two countries had already halted propaganda broadcasts along the demilitarized zone, Seoul’s military said in June after the election of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, who is seeking to ease tensions with Pyongyang. The South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Monday last week said it had begun removing loudspeakers from its side of the border as “a practical measure aimed at helping ease
CONFLICT: The move is the latest escalation of the White House’s pitched battle with Harvard University as more than US$2 billion is suspended US President Donald Trump’s administration threatened to assume ownership of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents from Harvard University, accusing the Ivy League college of failing to comply with the law on federal research grants. In a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber on Friday, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the university is failing its obligations to US taxpayers, paving the way for a process that could result in the government seizing its patents under the Bayh-Dole Act. Harvard has until Sept. 5 to prove it is complying with the requirements, including whether it showed a
RSS