Al-Zarqawi led Spain attacks, writer claims

By Daniel Woolls
The Associated Press

	Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
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MADRID, Spain — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to al-Qaida and suspected of heading a terrorist network in Iraq, is now believed to have planned the deadly Madrid railway attacks, a French investigator and author said yesterday.

Jean-Charles Brisard, who has written a book on Osama bin Laden, said Spanish officials told him some suspects held in the March 11 attacks were in contact with al-Zarqawi as recently as a month or two before the bombings, which killed 190 people and wounded more than 1,800.

"They believe today he was the mastermind," Brisard said in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Spanish Interior Ministry declined to comment.

U.S. officials blame al-Zarqawi for the March 2 bombings in Iraq that killed at least 181 Shiite Muslims. Ansar al-Islam, the group to which al-Zarqawi is linked, has often attacked Iraqi targets — Shiite pilgrims or Iraqi police — with the aim of sowing discord and perhaps civil war. Al-Zarqawi is also thought to have been behind the 2002 killing of Laurence Foley, a U.S. diplomat in Jordan.

Radio network Cadena SER reported yesterday that police think they have found the house where the bombs were built. Investigators found detonators and traces of dynamite inside the house near Alcala de Henares, 20 miles northeast of Madrid, SER reported. It said the attackers were believed to have used the building to prepare the explosives and stuff them into knapsacks.

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