Spain - Madrid bombers financed with drug sales

Thursday, April 15, 2004

MADRID, Spain -- Terrorists who carried out the Madrid train bombings were members of an autonomous cell who may have had ties with fundamentalists elsewhere but got their financing chiefly from drug profits, the interior minister said Wednesday. Officials are investigating the possibility that someone with a deeper grounding in radical Islam -- and perhaps terrorist training in Afghanistan or elsewhere -- was the overall leader of the March 11 attacks that killed 191 people, but aren't sure such a person even exists, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said. Acebes said the person "has been called the emir," but would not give any other details.

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