Scale of attack leads some to question separatist role

If the Basque separatist group ETA was behind yesterday's carnage in Madrid, it would mark an attack of unprecedented scale and sophistication for a relatively small terrorist group that has been increasingly marginalized in recent years.

And while the type of explosives used in the attacks bore the hallmarks of ETA, the coordination and indiscriminate nature of the explosions led some analysts to point the finger at Al Qaeda, which has been active in Spain. After a van containing detonators and audiotapes of the Koran in Arabic were found about 15 miles east of Madrid following the explosions, Spanish officials acknowledged that they were keeping an open mind about who was behind the attacks.

According to Joseba Zulaika, director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada at Reno, the timing of the explosions, three days before Spain's general election, could have been a motive for either group: Batasuna, the political party linked to ETA, was banned by the Spanish government last year, while Al Qaeda would relish punishing a country whose leader, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, has been a staunch US ally in the war on terrorism and in the invasion of Iraq.

A third possibility is that the attack was the result of an alliance between ETA and Al Qaeda, although analysts consider that possibility extremely remote. Although both groups hate the Spanish government, there has been no evidence of them cooperating before.

"The Arabs would not be natural allies for ETA," said Zulaika, author of "Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament."

Since 1968, ETA -- an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which in the Basque language means "Basque Homeland and Freedom" -- has waged a violent campaign to force the Spanish government to grant independence to the Basque country, a region that spans northeast Spain and southern France. In that time, ETA has killed about 850 people, mostly by isolated assassinations of police officers, soldiers, judges, and politicians. The group is on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations.

In 2002, ETA attacks killed five people; last year, they killed three. In the deadliest act attributed to the group, 21 people were killed at a Barcelona supermarket in 1987, an operation ETA later claimed was "a mistake."

While ETA has killed many civilians over the years, often with car bombs, and has targeted trains before, it had never carried out an operation like yesterday's, where 10 backpacks stuffed with TNT were placed on commuter trains.

"It doesn't seem like their style," said Ricardo Parellada, a professor at the European University of Madrid who is a visiting scholar at Harvard's Real Colegio Complutense. "But I don't think we can rule out ETA, either. They are more isolated than ever, and they are more desperate than ever."

Like other analysts, Parellada says a possible motive for mounting such an attack would be to provoke a crackdown by the Spanish government against all Basques, creating more solidarity in a region where most Basques do not want to secede from Spain.

Spain's Basque region has considerable autonomy, with its own parliament and police force. Batasuna, ETA's political wing, has never garnered more than 15 percent of the vote there, and support has dwindled in recent years.

Alberto Abadie, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who has studied the economic impact of terrorism, said it may take some time to clarify who was behind the attack.

"ETA usually claims responsibility. They've also given warnings in the past," he said. "The scale and the simultaneity of the attacks have never happened before in Spain. But there is some possibility it was Al Qaeda."

ETA has longstanding links to the Irish Republican Army, but in Spain there has never been anything resembling the peace process in Northern Ireland, which saw the IRA end its violent campaign in exchange for a seat at the negotiating table for its political allies in Sinn Fein.

Under Aznar, whose rise to power was aided by popular support he received after ETA tried to kill him in 1995, the Spanish government has targeted ETA like never before, closing its newspapers, banning Batasuna, and locking up more than 200 members in a security crackdown aided by the French government over the past two years.

That crackdown has left ETA with a younger, more radicalized leadership, one that some analysts say might have been willing to up the ante.