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Spanish court convicts terror suspects of reduced charges

The Associated Press
Published: February 27, 2008

MADRID, Spain: Judges acquitted 20 Islamic terror suspects Wednesday of conspiring to blow up the court that is the nerve center of the country's terror investigations, but convicted them of lesser offenses.

The National Court found 18 of the 20 suspects guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization, and two others of collaborating with the group. Their sentences ranged from five to 15 years in prison. Ten others were acquitted of all charges.

Police revealed the plot in October 2004, based on information from an informant. It alarmed Spaniards still reeling from the Madrid commuter train bombings earlier that year. That massacre by Islamic militants killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800 wounded.

Prosecutors said at the time that militants had planned to ram a truck loaded with explosives and driven by suicide attackers into the National Court, hoping to kill judges and other staff and destroy case records at the hub of Spain's investigations into Islamic terror cases.

The prosecutors eventually filed charges against the suspects, including conspiracy to commit a terrorist act. The trial began in October and concluded in January.
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The National Court houses the offices of Judge Baltasar Garzon, the investigating magistrate who has led a number of terror cases and in 2003 indicted Osama bin Laden and other 34 other al-Qaida suspects in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S.

But a three-judge panel at the court ruled Wednesday that the alleged plot to destroy the building — a seemingly easy target on a busy street in downtown Madrid — never amounted to more than a "quasi-obsession with certain judges" on the part of the group's alleged mastermind, an Algerian named Abderrahmane Tahiri who also went by the name Mohamed Achraf.

The plan never developed or came close to being executed, and there is no evidence that most of the suspects even knew about it, the panel said in a 247-page verdict.

"Thinking up and suggesting a terrorist target does not constitute conspiracy per se," it said.

But the 20 suspects now convicted — many already jailed on unrelated charges when police learned of the alleged plan — did plot to create Islamic terror cells, both behind bars and extending elsewhere in Spain, the judges said.

Tahiri created one cell while jailed in the town of Topas in northern Spain, and he and other suspects exchanged letters with inmates in other prisons around Spain, recruiting them for attacks once they were freed, the judges wrote.

They called Tahiri "the head of this true terrorist network."