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Spanish Interior Minister to PP leader: Repeat with me, it was not ETA
By m.p. - Nov 1, 2007 - 11:32 PM
ALSO SEE : • Madrid train bomb suspect arrested in Morocco at Spain's request - Jan 28, 2008 - 7:38 PM
• Spanish National Court acquits Moroccan suspect charged with extolling terrorism - Nov 8, 2007 - 10:18 PM

Interior Minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, at Thursday’s press conference. Photo – EFE.
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Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba could not have been more clear in his view on the National Court verdict on the Madrid train bombing tragedy: that the Basque terrorists had no part in it
The Spanish Interior Minister spoke to journalists on Thursday on Wednesday’s verdict in the Madrid train bombings, and much of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba’s press conference centred on what the National Court ruled as proved in the case: in the Minister’s own words, that the bombings were the work of ‘radical jihadism, radical Islamicism and radical terrorism.’

The Minister said the sentence has firmly closed the debate on who was responsible, and ETA had no part in it. His invitation to the opposition leader made headline news in the media, when he publicly asked Mariano Rajoy, to ‘repeat with me: it was not ETA. And repeat with all the judges and security forces: it was not ETA, so we can then get down to the job of working together to prevent anything like this ever happening again.’

Rubalcaba described the judicial process on 11-M, as the tragic bombings on 11th March 2004 are referred to in Spain, as ‘the most important of any in the world after an attack of this type.’

PSOE’s Secretary for Organisation, José Blanco, also had some words for the opposition: he accused, José María Aznar, the PP Prime Minister at the time of the bombings, of being the ‘intellectual author of the massive deception’ of 11-M, and the current PP leader, Mariano Rajoy, and the PP spokesman in Congress, Eduardo Zaplana, as its ‘necessary collaborators.’ Zaplana gave his own press conference in response to the comments from the governing Socialists. He described the government’s reaction as ‘surprising hysteria,’ and again accused PSOE of using 11-M to win the general elections, as he says they did at the time of the attack.

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PP General Secretary, Ángel Acebes. Archive photo – EFE.
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The blasts came just a few days before the 2004 national poll which ousted the PP from power.

‘Aznar, Rajoy, Acebes’ – Ángel Acebes, the PP General Secretary and party number two – ‘and I,’ he said, ‘were members of the government which acted with speed to take all the accused into custody, while PSOE’s actions were weak.’

The PP spokesman made his own call in response to Rubalcaba’s, which El País reports as a direct message to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero:
‘I want the Prime Minister to say, it was not Iraq.’


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