Terror Anniversary
March 11, 2007
King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia inaugurated the memorial -- a glittering cylinder of glass brick -- less than a month after 29 suspects went on trial in the attack that ripped apart four rush-hour trains approaching Madrid's Atocha railway station.
Around 1,800 people were injured by 10 bombs, which had been stuffed into sports bags and set off by mobile phones. One woman remains in a coma and hundreds others are still plagued by medical and psychological problems.
On a sunny spring day, relatives of victims and survivors bowed their heads in silence as the king laid a wreath at the foot of the 11-metre (36 ft) tower -- its height a reference to the date Spain suffered its worst peace-time attack.
"A place of reflection"
The tower's architects -- five friends working on their first commission -- said the design's main ingredient was light.
Sunshine hitting the column of 15,000 glass bricks focuses light into an empty, blue chamber below a busy highway, which
the public can access via Atocha station.
From below, visitors can peer skywards to read hundreds of messages of condolence and support wrapped around the inside of the cylinder.
"When the sunlight completely fills the chamber, it's like an explosion of light. It's a calm environment, a place of reflection," one of the architects, Esau Acosta, from firm Estudio FAM told Reuters.
Three days after the bombs, Spain held general elections and voted out the conservative Popular Party (PP), a close US ally, putting in its place a Socialist government that quickly fulfilled a pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.
The trial of those accused of carrying out the attacks will hear from more than 600 witnesses and 100 experts before a panel of three judges gives its verdict, probably in early autumn.
Separate commemorations were held at two other stations hit by blasts on Sunday.
Massive opposition demonstrations
On the eve of the bombings anniversary, Spain's opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) organized a new mass rally against the government in Madrid after bringing thousands out on the streets on Friday evening in 65 towns and cities across the country.
The PP is seeking to get its own back with unceasing attacks on the socialist government's alleged soft line on Basque separatism.
Under a banner reading, "Spain for freedom. No more concessions to ETA", the opposition Popular Party (PP) has billed the protest as the most important demonstration in Spain's 30-year democracy.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in the Senate last week that the PP could not make up for its own past mistakes by stirring up political trouble against his government.
"You were the ones who lost the March 14 (2005) elections ... through your own errors," Zapatero charged, singling out the PP's backing for the US-led invasion of Iraq and its insistence that the Basque separatist movement ETA carried out the train bombings.
Most Spanish observers believe the bombs were planted by radical Muslims angry at the decision in 2003 by then PP Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to back the invasion and send Spanish troops in support.
However, PP hardliners and sections of the right-wing media insist on a "conspiracy theory" whereby ETA might have colluded with Islamists in the attacks on crowded commuter trains and stations.
ETA is classified in Spain, in Brussels and in Washington as a terrorist group. Polls often show that Spaniards view ETA as their country's biggest problem, part of a threat that also includes Muslim extremism.
"Spain is Christian"
With municipal elections three months off and general elections next year, the PP is nevertheless playing the ETA card for all it is worth, boosted by the December 30 car bomb blast at Madrid airport that killed two people.
It was the first deadly attack since mid-2003 by the group in its violent campaign for independence for the northern Basque
country, breaking a self-declared truce that had raised hopes for a solution to the long-running crisis.
While the government promptly declared that ETA had ruled itself out of any peace negotiations, the PP has now seized on Zapatero's decision to release conditionally Basque militant Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos, who had spent 20 years in jail for 25 murders.
After being given a further prison term just ahead of his scheduled release for expressing support for ETA in newspaper
articles, Juana Chaos began a hunger strike which left him emaciated to the extent doctors feared for his life.
In the face of PP charges of giving into ETA blackmail, the government retorted that it had showed "humanitarian" clemency to Juana Chaos, while also fearing his death could have turned him into an ETA martyr.
Zapatero also accused the PP of hypocrisy, pointing out that while last in power it released more than 300 ETA prisoners before the end of their sentences.
Right-wingers are still prepared to drag in the March 11 bombings into their protests however: demonstrators against Zapatero have carried placards reading, "Spain is Christian, not Muslim."