SPAIN: A fresh attempt to wreak havoc with a bomb attack on Spanish trains was foiled yesterday after a bag containing explosives was discovered under a high-speed rail track 40 miles south of Madrid.
The acting Interior Minister, Mr Angel Acebes, said the device was discovered shortly before midday and was believed to contain between 10 and 12 kilos of explosives.
He confirmed last night that the explosives appeared to be a brand called Goma 2 Eco - exactly the same type used in the Madrid bombings on March 11th in which 191 people were killed and more than 1,900 injured.
That left Spaniards contemplating the possibility that, despite a series of arrests, at least part of the bombing team behind the Madrid attacks might still be active.
The bomb was connected by a cable to a detonator some 130 metres from the tracks as they ran through Toledo province on a route from Madrid to Cordoba and the southern city of Seville.
The alarm was raised by a railway employee who spotted the bag containing the explosives and alerted police.
Spanish news media said the bomb had been planted some time after 8 a.m. and that the bombers must have thought they had been spotted, because it was only half connected to the detonator.
Trains stopped running along the high-speed line late yesterday morning as police scoured the tracks to make sure no other bombs had been planted.
In the March 11th attacks, each of the dozen bombs planted by what police say was a group of radical Islamist terrorists was placed inside a bag and also contained 10 to 12 kilos of explosives.
But unlike the bomb discovered yesterday the Madrid bombs had detonators attached to mobile telephones.
Several days ago the Spanish police reportedly discovered the isolated country house, also in Toledo province, where the bombs used on March 11th were built.
At least one of the 20 plus people arrested since the Madrid bombings, most of whom are of Moroccan origin, was also arrested in the province.
Police have issued photographs of six men they are still looking for in connection with the bombings.
Five of them are Moroccans but a sixth man, the Tunisian Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Farkhet, is thought to be the gang's ringleader, according to court documents quoted by some Spanish newspapers.
Another men, named as Said Berraj, was yesterday reported by the newspaper El Mundo to have met various al-Qaeda members in Turkey over three years ago.
Mr Berraj disappeared from his job in Madrid on March 12th, saying he was returning to Morocco for a funeral.
Yesterday's find immediately led to the freezing of all traffic along the high-speed link between Madrid and Seville, which is considered the pride of the Spanish rail network. Trains on the line reach speeds of up to 190 miles an hour. Passengers on trains running along the line at the time of the bomb's discovery were reportedly evacuated on to coaches, which joined the flood of Easter holiday traffic on the country's motorway network.
The explosives used in the Madrid attacks were reported to have been obtained from quarries in the northern Spanish region of Asturias. - (Guardian Service)
The FBI's counterterrorism division and US Department of Homeland Security have warned of a possible plot involving explosives that targets commercial transportation systems during the summer in major US cities.
The two agencies said, "We assess that buses and railways could be targeted."