The aforementioned secret report of the Ertzaintza, written on 12 March 2004, was published 20 years later by El Diario. The document shows that the PP government mobilized the staff of Vitoria of the National Intelligence Service to seek and disseminate to the press the connection between ETA and Al Qaeda, at least until March 14, until the elections to the Spanish Congress. “If ETA had not been linked, everyone would be unemployed,” the Ertzaintza report clarifies.

‘Zulo’, a confidential source

The senior officials of the Spanish Intelligence Service knew that by noon on 11 March, at least with absolute certainty, the attack was caused by Al Qaeda and not by ETA. In fact, by then the Spanish police had already detected a van with explosives and poems from the Koran. From then on, the Vitoria staff of the National Intelligence Service was called to “seek” the ties between Al Qaeda and ETA.

On March 11, at 20:00 hours, the Vitorian spiders called a trusted person from the Ertzaintza in Madrid. This trusted person had the nickname Zulo and the reliability rating from “A” to “C” had the highest level.

“The Government of Spain is annoyed because they know it has been Al Qaeda and not ETA,” Zulo told the Ertzaintza. As can be seen from the report, the members of the Intelligence Service asked the contact in more than one call to tell the press that ETA participated in the attack or at least that ETA “maintained relations with Arab terrorists”.

193 deaths, thousand wounded and much misinformation

On 11 March 2004, in the morning, al Qaeda placed explosives on the four trains. The Spanish Government attributed the authorship to ETA from the very beginning, as two weeks before it tried to put a bomb. Ibarretxe, President of the Basque Government, also entrusted ETA with unequivocal responsibility, even if it did not have specific information. The report published by ARGIA next week highlights this idea that a government should not be based on assumptions.

It was the most serious attack in the history of Spain and three days later elections were called to the Spanish Courts. All the polls said Aznar's PP would win again. The PP strongly attributed the responsibility for the attack to ETA and, although it published other information that would disguise this information, Aznar maintained the lie that the Spanish Government had participated in the Iraq war following the attacks.

Anjel Berrueta and Kontxi Sanchiz

On the eve of the elections, on the day of spontaneous “reflection”, citizen mobilizations and PP lies continued as in previous days. In a context in which several sectors continued to point to ETA, the baker Angel Berrueta was killed in Pamplona by a Spanish police and his son. The person responsible for the M11 attack was murdered for not wanting to put a ETA cartel in the bakery. The following day, Kontxi Sanchiz died in Hernani in a demonstration in tribute to Berrueta, after suffering a heart attack after a load of the Ertzaintza.