National
Spanish Interior Minister to PP leader: Repeat with me, it was not ETA
By m.p.
Nov 1, 2007 - 11:32 PM

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.’