A man presented by Spanish television as a witness who led police to a suspicious van after this week's deadly bombings said Friday he had seen three men wearing balaclavas near the vehicle shortly before powerful blasts ripped through suburban trains killing 199 people.
The man, whose identity was not given, told TVE's Informe semanal program he had been surprised to see the trio wearing the winter gear in Alcala de Henares, east of the capital, even though temperatures were rather mild on Thursday morning when the attacks were carried out.
Two of the young men remained near the vehicle while the third, carrying a backpack and another bag and described as rather tall, headed to the Alcala train station from where the doomed trains departed for Madrid, he said.
After Thursday's attacks the man had told police about the suspicious van in which investigators later found seven detonators and an audio tape with Koranic verses.
Interior Minister Angel Acebes said Thursday the van had been reported stolen. The verses in Arabic were among those "usually used to teach the Koran," and that they "did not contain any threat," he said.
The find added a new element to the investigation into the blasts, which went off in rush-hour morning trains, also wounding more than 1,400 people.
The Spanish government has blamed the armed Basque separatist group ETA for the carnage, but there have been growing fears the attacks could have been carried out by Al-Qaeda in retaliation for Spain's role in the US-led occupation of Iraq.
A temporary morgue set up at Juan Carlos exhibition center in northern Madrid for the bodies of the bomb attacks was closed Friday night after a first batch of identifications, a justice ministry official said.
Of the 193 bodies taken to the morgue, 153 have been identified and returned to their families.
The 40 others were to be transferred to a morgue at Almudena cemetery in Madrid, justice secretary of state Rafael Catala said.
Remains that are still unidentified because they are lacking distinctive signs like fingerprints will undergo DNA tests. Authorities hope to be able to identify them within 36 hours.
Madrid's regional government meanwhile said that 289 of the 1,482 people wounded in the attacks were still hospitalized late Friday.
Eighteen of them were in critical condition, 175 were seriously hurt and 48 slightly injured.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS