Madrid train bombings trial begins

Spain is on high alert as 29 people go on trial charged over the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and injured about 2,000.

The March 11 blasts on four packed commuter trains is the deadliest attack linked to al-Qaeda in Europe.

Hundreds of police will protect the Madrid courtroom where the accused - Arabs and Spaniards - face charges ranging from membership of a terrorist group to stealing dynamite from mines in northern Spain to sell to the bombers, often in exchange for drugs.

Of these, three are alleged to have masterminded the attack. A fourth key organiser was one of seven suspects who blew themselves up in an apartment block weeks after the bombs.

"This is the beginning - or rather the end of the long, hard road we've been on for the last three years," said Pilar Manjon, the head of a victims association.

The bombings not only traumatised Spain but led to the fall of the conservative government and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.

The attack was initially blamed on Basque separatists ETA, but when ever more evidence pointed to Islamist militants, Spaniards turned out in force to demonstrate against the government and voted them out of power.

The prosecuting judge who prepared the case linked the bombs to a call by Osama bin Laden to attack countries that backed the allied war in Iraq and to an internet essay that urged attackers to hit Spain before the elections.

An report drawn up by the state prosecutor says four men heeded the al-Qaeda call and started planning the attack in 2003.

They recruited others at a Madrid mosque and from the criminal underworld.

Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, who is charged with inciting people to carry out the attack, will be the first to take the stand in Madrid.

Ahmed, known as "Mohamed the Egyptian", has already been convicted of belonging to a terrorist group and sentenced to ten years in jail by an Italian court. He has been extradited to Spain for the Madrid hearings.

The hearings are expected to last until July when the three-judge panel will retire to consider the evidence.

They are not expected to come out with their verdicts and sentences until October at the earliest.

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