SPAIN: The recently-defeated Partido Popular is coming extremely close to questioning the legitimacy of the centre-left government, writes Paddy Woodworth
The accounts of the March 11th train bombings given to a parliamentary commission in Madrid over the last two days differ so radically that they sometimes seem to belong in parallel universes.
The interior minister at the time of the attacks, Ángel Acebes, not only insisted that he had been perfectly justified in telling the Spanish people that the Basque terrorist group ETA was the prime - indeed only - suspect on Thursday March 11th.
He asserted, in a marathon 10-hour appearance before the commission, that "we did not have one single strong objective fact which could have led the investigation in the direction of Islamist terrorists", until the police arrested five Moroccans the following Saturday.
One has to wonder, then, why the police made these arrests at all.
In fact, evidence given by top police and intelligence officers in earlier sessions had, almost unanimously, spoken of how their inquiries had pointed away from ETA and towards Islamist terrorists from an early stage. And they had listed the "strong objective facts" that led them in this direction: a Koranic tape in a van used by the bombers, the type of explosive and detonator used, descriptions of Arab suspects by passengers.
Acebes, in a performance more distinguished by its assurance and stamina than by its logical rigour, dismissed these clues as "insignificant". But he went much further: he asserted that the circumstantial evidence still pointed to ETA as the "intellectual authors" of the attack.
He found it difficult to believe, he said, that the Moroccans, known to the police only as "drug-dealers and car-thieves", could have directed an attack of such technical and political sophistication. He accused the current government of dereliction of duty by not investigating ETA-al-Qaeda links.
Acebes's successor, José Antonio Alonso, flatly contradicted him yesterday. "All the objective facts lead to Islamists, and not a shred of evidence suggests ETA involvement." He reminded Acebes that an investigation in a democracy is based on facts alone, and not on "devious guesswork".
There is a lot more at stake in this commission than the clarification of the origins of the bombings, hugely important though that is.
Acebes's party, the centre-right Partido Popular (PP), lost the elections held four days after the massacre, which were won against all expectations by the centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE).
This reversal was almost certainly due to the widespread suspicion that the PP had played politics with the attack, blaming ETA and denying any Islamist involvement because such involvement would reflect on the government's deeply unpopular support for the invasion of Iraq.
The PP now inverts this charge by accusing the PSOE of having fomented this suspicion for electoral advantage.
An essential part of the PP strategy, therefore, is to assert that their widely discredited information strategy in the days after the bombing was not only valid then, but is still valid now.
Acebes and other PP leaders are coming very close to questioning the legitimacy of the PSOE government. It is hard, in fact, to recall any EU administration coming under such fierce attack from recently-defeated opponents.
The PSOE parliamentary spokesman, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, last night concluded the current session of the commission with a strong counter-attack. He openly accused Acebes of deliberately hiding evidence linking the attacks to Islamists from the public.
He denied any involvement in mobilising the crowds which gathered to denounce the PP in technically illegal demonstrations on the eve of the elections.
He added that it was the PP government which had broken the long-standing anti-terrorist unity pact between the two parties by refusing to keep the PSOE informed of developments.
Rubalcaba proposed that the commission should work towards a new pact between all parties against Islamist terrorism.
The fracture between the PP and all the other parties on the commission is now so deep, however, that it is hard to see how any such pact could be agreed in the foreseeable future - a fact that al-Qaeda must find comforting.
Relatives of the 191 victims of the bombings may well wonder how such parliamentary animosity can assist in healing their wounds.
However, the commission did agree one thing as it wound up for the August break last night - it will meet again in September, and may call further witnesses.