The ringleader of the Madrid terrorist attack last month was among four suicide bombers who died Saturday in a police raid, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said yesterday .
The group had explosives ready for more attacks, he added.
Acebes said the four included a Tunisian named Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, described by Spanish authorities as the leader of the group suspected of carrying out the March 11 attacks that killed 191 people.
"The core of the group that carried out the attacks is either arrested or dead in yesterday's collective suicide, including the head of the operative commando," Acebes told a news conference.
Fahket was one of six men for whom international arrest warrants were issued. Another man on that list, Abdennabi Kounjaa, a Moroccan, was identified as among the four who died Saturday night. A third man -- Asri Rifaat Anouar -- was not on the list. The fourth suspect has not been identified, Acebes said.
One of the dead bombers was found with an explosives-laden belt around his body, he said.
Police found 200 detonators of the kind used in the March 11 attacks and in a bomb that was placed along a high-speed rail-line on Friday but failed to detonate, Acebes said.
Police also found 10kg of dynamite in the apartment where the four terrorists blew themselves up Saturday night, Acebes said.
"They were going to keep on attacking because some of the explosives were prepared and connected to detonators," Acebes said.
As police prepared to storm that apartment in Leganes, south of Madrid, the suicide terrorists set off a thundering blast that also killed a special operations officer and wounded 15 other policemen.
The blast gutted at least one floor of the building -- a square structure with a central courtyard where children had been playing soccer until they were evacuated. The explosion sent up a huge plume of black smoke and revealed rooms littered with concrete and wires dangling from ceilings. Architects will now decide whether it is to demolished altogether because of structural damage.
Police had approached the building at around 7pm to make arrests as part of an escalating manhunt for those responsible for the March 11 bombings.
The suspects spotted the police from a window and shot at them, shouting in Arabic, the Interior Ministry said. No police officers were hurt by the gunfire.
Over the next two hours, police evacuated as many people as they could from the building and surrounding area and prepared for an assault on the apartment.
As the terrorists shot at police from the apartment, "they shouted "God is great" and Islamic verses," the newspaper El Mundo quoted a resident of the building as saying. It identified him only as Alberto M., who lived two floors up.
El Pais said special forces preparing the assault managed to communicate with the terrorists and gave them a deadline to surrender. But the terrorists shouted back "God is great, we are going to go out killing," the newspaper said, quoting police.
The terrorists set off their bomb in a second-story apartment after police blasted open the ground-floor entrance, the Interior Ministry said.
ACCOUNTABILITY: The incident, which occured at a Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store in Taichung, was allegedly caused by a gas explosion on the 12th floor Shin Kong Group (新光集團) president Richard Wu (吳昕陽) yesterday said the company would take responsibility for an apparent gas explosion that resulted in four deaths and 26 injuries at Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Zhonggang Store in Taichung yesterday. The Taichung Fire Bureau at 11:33am yesterday received a report saying that people were injured after an explosion at the department store on Section 3 of Taiwan Boulevard in Taichung’s Situn District (西屯). It sent 56 ambulances and 136 paramedics to the site, with the people injured sent to Cheng Ching Hospital’s Chung Kang Branch, Wuri Lin Shin Hospital, Taichung Veterans General Hospital or Chung
‘TAIWAN-FRIENDLY’: The last time the Web site fact sheet removed the lines on the US not supporting Taiwanese independence was during the Biden administration in 2022 The US Department of State has removed a statement on its Web site that it does not support Taiwanese independence, among changes that the Taiwanese government praised yesterday as supporting Taiwan. The Taiwan-US relations fact sheet, produced by the department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, previously stated that the US opposes “any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence; and we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means.” In the updated version published on Thursday, the line stating that the US does not support Taiwanese independence had been removed. The updated
‘CORRECT IDENTIFICATION’: Beginning in May, Taiwanese married to Japanese can register their home country as Taiwan in their spouse’s family record, ‘Nikkei Asia’ said The government yesterday thanked Japan for revising rules that would allow Taiwanese nationals married to Japanese citizens to list their home country as “Taiwan” in the official family record database. At present, Taiwanese have to select “China.” Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said the new rule, set to be implemented in May, would now “correctly” identify Taiwanese in Japan and help protect their rights, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The statement was released after Nikkei Asia reported the new policy earlier yesterday. The name and nationality of a non-Japanese person marrying a Japanese national is added to the
There is no need for one country to control the semiconductor industry, which is complex and needs a division of labor, Taiwan’s top technology official said yesterday after US President Donald Trump criticized the nation’s chip dominance. Trump repeated claims on Thursday that Taiwan had taken the industry and he wanted it back in the US, saying he aimed to restore US chip manufacturing. National Science and Technology Council Minister Wu Cheng-wen (吳誠文) did not name Trump in a Facebook post, but referred to President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments on Friday that Taiwan would be a reliable partner in the
RSS