It is no mistake the Associated Press neglected to mention this troublesome detail. It is also no mistake the Tunisian Serhan Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet blew “himself up along with six other suspects when police surrounded their apartment three weeks after the bombings,” along with Jamal Ahmidan, the Moroccan “military planner” of the operation, as the Associated Press notes. Suicide is often the fate suffered by patsies with too much information, especially “al-Qaeda” patsies.

Rafa Zuher “was a police informer to an elite unit of the Guardia Civil known as Unidad Central de Operaciones,” writes Michel Chossudovsky. It should come as no surprise that the Guardia Civil operated as the secret police for Spain’s long-time fascist ruler, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and long accused of war crimes (during the Spanish Civil War), torture and atrocities. Moreover, Jose Emilio Suarez “had in his possession the telephone number of the Head of Tedax, Juan Jesus Sanchez Manzano. Tedax is Spain’s Civil Guard bomb squad , a very specialized division of the Spanish police. A official of the this special unit was in fact involved in the deactivation of one of the bombs which was to be placed in the train.” Again, not surprising, although completely ignored by the corporate media at the time because the script called for blaming “al-Qaeda,” who apparently wanted to get José María Aznar (a former Falangist, or fascist) re-elected. Instead, Spaniards elected Rodríguez Zapatero, a socialist.

José María Aznar attempted to blame Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (”Basque Fatherland and Liberty”), or ETA, for the bombings but this didn’t jive with the emerging script, as drafted by the Straussian neocons, who attribute all terrorism to “al-Qaeda” because all such acts are of course attributed to evil Muslims and Arabs, as exemplified by the mythical “al-Qaeda,” in fact a CIA-ISI contrivance. Arnaldo Otegi, leader of Batasuna, a Basque political party, shifted the blame away from ETA and suggested “Arab resistance” was the most probable perpetrator. On March 11, 2004, it was widely reported that a stolen van was located in the Spanish town of Alcalá de Henares containing several detonators and an Arabic-language cassette tape with Qur’anic verses (as it turns out, this tape was a commercial product and contained no material specific to the attacks). Apparently, Islamic terrorists are in the habit of leaving behind Islamic religious materials, as Marwan Alshehhi, supposedly one of the nine eleven hijackers, left behind a Qur’an in a rental car discovered at Boston’s Logan airport (along with instructions on how to fly a commercial airplane and a fuel consumption calculator).

In addition to the direct and ignored police involvement in the Madrid attacks, there is a suspicious connection between the Moroccan Jamal Zougam, pegged in the corporate media as the “leader of Spain’s al-Qaida cell,” and Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and London’s Finsbury Park Mosque. Abu Hamza al-Masri admitted during his recent trial on terrorism charges that “he had met several times with police officers and members of the MI5 spy service,” the Associated Press reported in February. Haroon Rashid Aswat, supposedly linked to the London bombings, was revealed as a British intelligence asset last August. Aswat was involved with al-Masri and his al-Muhajiroun group (see a photo of the two together here). According to John Loftus, a former US federal prosecutor, al-Muhajiroun was used “to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo,” as Michael Meacher, former British MP, wrote for the Guardian last September.

As it turns out, al-Muhajiroun, and thus al-Masri, are connected to British, U.S., Pakistani, and German intelligence, and worked for NATO in Kosovo. Loftus told Fox News (and it is a miracle Fox News reported this) the “CIA was funding the [Kosovo] operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting. Now we have a lot of detail on this because Captain Hook [al-Masri], the head of Al-Muhajiroun, [his] sidekick was Bakri Mohammed, another cleric. And back on October 16, 2001, he gave a detailed interview with al-Sharq al-Aswat, an Arabic newspaper in London, describing the relationship between British intelligence and the operations in Kosovo and Al-Muhajiroun” (see Michel Chossudovsky, London 7/7 Terror Suspect Linked to British Intelligence?).

Here we have a connection between Jamal Zougam, the “leader of Spain’s al-Qaida cell,” suspected in the Madrid bombings, and British-American-Pakistani-German intelligence operations. It is possible the Spanish Unidad Central de Operaciones worked with these intelligence operations to create false flag terrorism, terrorist acts eerily similar to the NATO-linked Gladio operations in Italy, most notably the 2nd of August 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, responsible for killing eighty-five people and attributed to Italy’s proto-fascist SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, or Military Intelligence and Security Service). As an interesting aside, the “influential” neocon and “Italianist” (i.e., he has an affinity for Mussolini and fascism), Michael Ledeen, was connected to SISMI, as the trial of Francesco Pazienza (who worked for SISMI) and statements by top intelligence officials made before the Italian parliment revealed.

We shouldn’t expect the corporate media to report any of this information, easily collated using a simple Google search, accessing “mainstream” publications. Instead, we are expected to believe the Madrid “Islamic terrorists” are “homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network,” itself a CIA-ISI contrivance. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the Madrid bombing was pulled off by a U.S.-British-Pakistani-German component of the intelligence monolith and not “radical Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian groups bent on carrying out attacks.” Of course, since the “mastermind” of the Madrid operation, the Tunisian Serhan Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, “blew himself up along with six other suspects when police surrounded their apartment three weeks after the bombings,” taking the “military planner” Jamal Ahmidan with him, a direct link to the real perpetrators of the bombings no longer exists. Dead men tell no tales.