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A Spanish policeman walks past a hole blasted through a train in an explosion at Madrid’s Atocha train station after an explosion March 11, 2004. Ten simultaneous explosions killed 182 people on packed Madrid commuter trains in Europe’s bloodiest attack for more than 15 years. Officials said 900 people were wounded. (Photo by Andrea Comas/Reuters)

Andrew Cawthorne, Reuters, Reports:

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said on Friday all leads would be pursued to catch the Madrid train attackers as investigators tried to pin down whether Basque separatists or Muslim militants were to blame.

“No line of investigation will be ruled out,” Aznar told a news conference minutes before mourning Spaniards marked a five minute silence for the nearly 200 dead.

“Nothing would please me more than to say ‘these are the murderers’ and to bring them to justice.”

Responsibility for Thursday’s attacks on packed Madrid commuter trains — which also wounded 1,430 people — could be crucial to the outcome of Sunday’s general election in Spain which is going ahead despite a halt to campaigning.

Victims from the Madrid bombs included 14 nationals of 10 other countries: three Peruvians, two Hondurans, two Poles, one Chilean, one Cuban, one Ecuadorean, one from Guinea Bissau, one French, one Moroccan and one Colombian, Aznar said. Madrid said its main line of investigation was Basque guerrilla group ETA, but suspicion al Qaeda may have been behind the atrocity sent shock waves around the world.

“The evidence points toward ETA but of course we cannot exclude any other possibility,” Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said on Friday.

As condemnation came from Pope John Paul to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, jittery European nations tightened security. Washington said a letter claiming responsibility for al Qaeda and threatening another September 11-style strike could be the “precursor” of another plot against America.

Amid three days of official mourning in Spain, many stopped at midday to express their disgust and solidarity with the victims.

Millions, including Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, were then expected to join evening protests called by Aznar under the slogan “With the Victims, With the Constitution, For the Defeat of Terrorism.”

But the slogan chosen for Friday’s demonstrations was viewed by some as politically motivated given Basque and Catalan separatists’ desire to re-write the constitution to gain independence for their regions — a hot election issue.

Spanish papers united in their condemnation of “Our September 11″ and said establishing blame would now be a critical factor in Sunday’s general election.
“The important thing is to … bring all the evidence to light so that Spaniards can go to the ballot box knowing who is the author of this massacre,” El Mundo said in an editorial.

The ruling center-right Popular Party (PP) had campaigned on its hardline stance against ETA. But if the attacks were the work of Islamic militants, it could be viewed as the price for Spain’s backing of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

“If the hell unleashed which burned the whole of Madrid on Thursday is the result of Islamic fanaticism, we must look at Spain’s role in the Iraq war: an involvement which our citizens rejected, a personal decision by the prime minister beyond the wishes of the majority,” commentator Antonio Gala said.

Updated official counts put the total of dead at 198, plus 1,430 wounded. With 60 of the wounded in a serious or very serious state, the death toll was expected to rise.

Spanish ministers were quick to point the finger at ETA on Thursday. But Interior Minister Angel Acebes later said police were not ruling out any line of inquiry after finding a van containing seven detonators and a tape in Arabic at a town near Madrid where the bombs may have been placed on the trains.

Spaniards were shocked and confused by the attacks.

“Not knowing who is responsible just makes it more awful,” Madrid resident Juan Ochoa said, discussing events in a bar. “Personally, I don’t think al Qaeda could operate here. Or the only way they could do it would be to pay someone else here.”

No authentication was available of the letter attributed to the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group aligned to al Qaeda.

“We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance,” said the letter, a copy of which was faxed by London-based al-Quds newspaper to Reuters in Dubai.

TEN BLASTS

Investigators say there were 10 blasts. The bombs, in rucksacks, each contained about 22 pounds of explosives.

Witnesses described scenes of horror at the three Madrid stations hit by the blasts. Trains crushed like “cans of tuna” while mobile phones rang eerily from the pockets of the dead.
If ETA is responsible it would be by far the bloodiest attack carried out by the group, which has killed about 850 people since 1968 in its fight for a separate Basque homeland in northwest Spain and southwest France. ETA has been branded a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.

Thursday’s death toll was the biggest in a guerrilla attack in Europe since December 1988 when a bomb exploded on board a Pan American Boeing 747, bringing it down on the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In all, 270 people were killed.

European shares slipped to fresh five-week lows on Friday while the dollar trimmed previous day’s losses on fallout from the Madrid blasts.

(Additional reporting by Marta Calleja, Adrian Croft, Elisabeth O’Leary, Daniel Trotta and Andrew Cawthorne)