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Tragedy
in Madrid
At the height of the morning rush hour on Thursday, March 11, 2004, 10 explosions
ripped through trains in three bustling stations in Madrid, Spain, leaving in
their wake 191 dead and 1,900 injured.
The reported mastermind, Moroccan psychiatrist Abu Hafiza, crafted a plan that
employed six or more operatives to plant bombs timed for simultaneous detonation,
a tactic aimed at amplifying the violence for greater psychological impact.
The meticulous planning began at least 10 months earlier, when Hafiza gathered
a number of al-Qaeda agents from Saudi Arabia and took them to Fallujah, Iraq.
Over the next few months, posing as a teacher from a religious school, Hafiza
roamed Iraq to gather intelligence— on behalf of Ayman al- Zawahiri.
The Madrid bombings were the latest in a lethal terrorist career extending
back to the mid-1990s, when Hafiza entered alQaeda’s inner circle.
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