Madrid victims get damages of up to 1.5 million euros (1st Lead)

Oct 31, 2007, 11:44 GMT

Abdelmajid Bouchar, one of the 28 defendants on charges related to the 11 March 2004 Madrid bomb attacks, during the reading of the sentences at the Audiencia Nacional Court in the Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I in Madrid, 31 October 2007. Abdelmajid Bouchar was condemned to eighteen years in prison, against the 38,960 years requested by the public prosecutor. EPA/Paco Campos

Madrid - The victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 and injured more than 1,800 people, will get damages ranging from 30,000 euros (43,000 dollars) to 1.5 million euros (2.2 million dollars), the National Court said when reading out the verdicts on Wednesday.

The amount of damages will depend on the seriousness of the harm caused to each victim by Europe's biggest al-Qaeda-inspired attack.

The victims were mere instruments through whom the terrorists attacked the Spanish state, judge Javier Gomez Bermudez said.

The court was to announce verdicts for 28 suspects, including Arabs and nine Spaniards.

Spain's top anti-terrorism court rejected the so-called conspiracy theory claiming that the Islamists acted in cooperation with the armed Basque separatist group ETA.

No evidence supported the theory of ETA involvement, judge Javier Gomez Bermudez said when commenting on the evidence.

The ETA theory had been defended by lawyers and media close to the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which was in government when the bombings occurred, and which had been accused of lying when initially blaming the attack on ETA.

The National Court also rejected arguments by defence lawyers that some of the key pieces of evidence, such as a bomb that failed to explode, were not authentic.

The accused listened to the judge with serious faces, many of them from behind bullet-proof glass. One of the 28, Egyptian Rabei Osman, heard the verdicts through a videoconference from Italy, where he is serving a prison sentence.

The three-judge panel issued the verdicts after three months of deliberations following a five-month trial featuring some 300 witnesses, 70 experts and 50 lawyers. The verdicts comprised 600 pages.

The bombings of four commuter trains were carried out by a Spanish cell loosely connected with al-Qaeda and comprising mainly immigrants of Arab origin.

Prosecutors had sought nearly 40,000 years in prison for three suspected planners, two bombers and three people, including one Spaniard, who supplied the attackers with explosives.