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The then number two of the Interior with the PSOE, Antonio Camacho, maintains that the Aznar Government hid the reports that the CNI had sent before the massacre of the trains
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The most traumatic transfer of power in democracy took place on April 18, 2004, just a month and a half after the train massacre in Madrid that caused 192 deaths (the attack ultimately left 193 dead because a police officer died on the 3rd). April in the explosion caused by the cell in an apartment in Leganés). The PSOE, against all odds, had won the general elections. The relationship between the outgoing PP government and the socialists was terrible; institutional courtesy was impossible. Political anger was then the normal condition of the country.
The transfer of powers was celebrated in the Ministry of the Interior just 15 days after the suicide of seven of the Islamist terrorists of the cell surrounded by the police in an apartment in Leganés (Madrid). That event buried the debate about who had caused the massacre. Or so it seemed. The PP Government proclaimed between March 11 and 14 that ETA was behind the attack. And months later he encouraged all kinds of hoaxes about that hypothesis, despite the evidence found in the rubble of the Leganés explosion.
”In that context, the only documentation they gave to Minister José Antonio Alonso was a folder with a sheet that had the hotels he could reserve for the JAI, the councils of Ministers of Justice and Interior. [en Bruselas]”, recalls now, two decades later, Antonio Camacho, then Secretary of State for Security. “With Ignacio Astarloa [su homólogo del PP] The treatment was very correct, but he did not give me any information in relation to the investigations into the 11-M attacks,” says Camacho. The Minister of the Interior of the PP, Ángel Aceces, assured then, however, that he spent two afternoons orally explaining the anti-terrorist policy to the new minister and that they gave the Secretary of State documentation on the issues discussed that occupied “an entire closet.”
The judge and the prosecutor of 11-M, before the great hoax
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The then Secretary of State for Security verified that information had been hidden from him when he called the first coordination meetings between the Police, the Civil Guard and the National Intelligence Center (CNI). “Suddenly I begin to notice that they are talking about things that I don’t know about, about possible people responsible for 11-M, and they were referring to a certain Allekema Lamari… I meet with the head of Intelligence, who was a military man, and I ask him if there is any CNI documentation regarding that. And then he brings me the CNI reports where there is one, from November of the previous year, where it was indicated that Allekema Lamari could be organizing an attack and that it would be advisable for him to control it. Lamari is one of the terrorists who blew himself up in the Leganés apartment on April 3, 2004, three weeks after the train attacks, but his identity was not confirmed until six months later.
José Bono, then Minister of Defense, wrote in May 2004 a note addressed to President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero about that CNI report supposedly hidden from the Interior. In his memoirs, Bono recounts an emergency meeting with Zapatero a year after the attacks, when some hoaxes pointed to the PSOE as an accomplice in the massacre: “He asks me to intervene in the Congress of Deputies to show that, In the 11-M attacks, the PP is responsible for not having heeded the CNI’s warnings. ‘You have to tell the truth and demonstrate with documents that the Aznar Government had enough data and warnings from the CNI, months before, that should have led it to take the measures it did not take. You just have to tell the truth, what you sent me in your note from last May.’ He shows it to me, and specifically that three days before the attack, on March 8, the Ministry of the Interior learned that the terrorist Allekema Lamari had decided to carry out a serious attack in Spain, three days before!!!
Bono is vague about the dates, but he is not precise about the content of the notice. A note from the CNI sent to the Interior on November 6, 2003—four months before the attacks—warned of the danger of the Algerian Allekema Lamari, who was distributing money among imprisoned Islamists, which was interpreted as a farewell: “Good because it is to leave Spain or because it would be imminent violent action on their part.” That note cited the possibility of an attack on a building with a “vehicle driven by a martyr.”
Camacho says that he can understand that the Interior did not pay attention to that CNI report in 2003, but not that no one told them during the transfer of powers that this intelligence note existed: “It may be that the secret service is not infallible, but the The fact is that the element existed and they hid it from us,” he says. Nor did they know in those first days at the head of the Interior that the CNI had prepared another report on March 15, 2004, four days after the attacks, in which it pointed to Lamari’s participation in the massacre and requested that the maximum priority to its location.
Lamari committed suicide on April 3, 2004 in the Leganés apartment with Abdennabi Kounjaa, Abdallah; Asri Rifaat Anouar; Mohamed and Rachid Oulad Akcha; Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, The Tunisian, and Jamal Ahmidan, The Chinese. But Algeria did not confirm until October 2004 that the DNA of the seventh Islamist yet to be identified corresponded to Allekema Lamari. Those CNI notices then gained all their value. The Algerian terrorist had been convicted of belonging to an armed gang in 2001, but he was released in June 2002 due to a miscarriage of justice. Bono, to whom the CNI depended, complained about this error to the president of the Supreme Court. The General Council of the Judiciary opened a file, but concluded that the judges’ violation had expired, as the former Minister of Defense and former President of Congress recalls in his memoirs.
Camacho verified in those coordination meetings that there was a huge information hole among the security forces; that the Civil Guard did not have access to the Police DNI databases; and that the Police also did not have access to the Civil Guard’s hotel registries databases. “The communications intercepted from the Islamist prisoners were not translated because there were no translators. We created the National Antiterrorist Center, with the presence of the CNI, for the coordination of all policies. And yet, the PP did not stop attacking us every day with various excuses,” he laments.
The lack of information about what the outgoing Government knew about the attack fueled some doubts about the real perpetrators of the massacre. The hoax that came later with many faces disregarded this evidence and spread various theories contrary to the facts until it reached the doors of the trial. The court was in charge of dismantling the hoax definitively in its ruling: “A piece of information is isolated, decontextualized, and the false impression is intended to be given that any conclusion depends exclusively on it, thus obviating the obligation of joint evaluation of the data that allows, through reasoning, to reach a conclusion according to the rules of logic and experience.”
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