DUBAI (Reuters) - A letter purporting to come from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
network has claimed responsibility for train bombings in Spain on Thursday,
calling them strikes against "crusaders", a London-based Arabic newspaper says.
The Spanish government has said Basque separatists were the main suspect in the
bombings of four trains early on Thursday that killed 190 people.
But the country's interior minister held open the possibility of a militant
Islamist link on Thursday evening when he told a newspaper conference that a
suspect van had been found containing detonators and an Arabic-language tape. He
said, however, militant Basque separatists remained chief suspects.
The London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper faxed to Reuters' Dubai bureau a
copy of a letter purporting to come from the "Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades". The
group aligns itself to al Qaeda, blamed by Washington for September 2001 attacks
on the United States.
"We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one
of the bases of the crusader alliance," said the letter which called the attacks
"Operation Death Trains".
There was no way of authenticating the letter.
The newspaper received similar letters from the same brigade claiming
responsibility on behalf of al Qaeda for a November bombing of two synagogues in
Turkey and the August bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Spain backed the United States in its invasion of Iraq, drawing the opprobrium
of militant Islamist groups.
