It is Monday, December 11 and La Vanguardia has made an appointment with Samira Zougam, the sister of Jamal, the main person convicted of the 11-M attacks in Madrid.
Samira enters a cafeteria in the Ciudad Lineal neighborhood of Madrid with her mother, Aicha Achab. She very soon realizes that this “is not an interview”, only an exploratory contact.
La Vanguardia expresses its interest in interviewing Jamal in prison, for a report on those who were involved in the plot.
To do this, and according to prison regulations, it must be the inmate who asks the prison management to be interviewed.
Zougam was sentenced in 2007 to 42,917 years in prison and is expected to serve the maximum term, 40 years. Until 2044. He was arrested on March 13, 2004.
But both women would only intercede with the prisoner, they allege, if it were for La Vanguardia to proclaim their innocence. So Samira and Aicha, without any such commitment, get up and leave.
Zougam (and his family) have sworn their innocence for twenty years. He was the only one convicted as the material author of the massacre, 192 dead.
The Madrid command – with Jamal already in preventive arrest – killed a GEO of the National Police on the following April 3, when seven terrorists were surrounded in an apartment in Leganés and immolated themselves.
Jamal was recognized by three train travelers (two women and a third unrelated) as the young man who left a bag on a train.
Apart from the recognition, the court considered other elements: its connection with the suicides and with the majority of the defendants; that neither his mother nor his brother claimed that on March 11, Jamal was at home between 6:30 and 8 in the morning and that they only claimed that he was at 9:45; that the SIM cards used to activate the bombs were sold in his store; and that in a dialogue that the Belgian police recorded in April 2004 between two jihadists, one tells the other that he is a friend of Zougam, "the one who carried out the attacks last month."
Zougam alleges that the recognition of the two women is not real and is due to their interest in obtaining roles (they were Romanian) and compensation as victims.
One of them (protected witness C-65) recognized Jamal from the beginning, but the other (J-70) took eleven months to do so, and did so only after discovering that if she accused Jamal she could obtain those benefits. She received €51,900.
Jamal's complaint, filed by lawyers Eduardo García Peña and Francisco Andújar, ended up being archived.
There was another witness, R-10, who recognized Zougam three times. He did not testify at trial, but his testimony was incorporated by reading.
In an interview with La Vanguardia published on the 4th, the 11-M judge, Javier Gómez Bermúdez, states that the recognition was “very solid.”
At the trial, Zougam's defense, carried out by the lawyer José Luis Abascal, tried to alter the story and point to ETA; In the ruling, the court crushed their conjectures by using nine reports or testimonies that eliminated any trace of the gang.
Zougam had little luck in subsequent judicial stages. The lawyer Iván Jiménez Aybar, to whom the family entrusted their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, “presented it after the deadline,” explains a source close to the family. He wasn't even checked. The lawyer has declined to explain what happened.
Today, the case lacks judicial proceedings, but Zougam has changed lawyers again. Now he is Manuel Ortega Caballero. La Vanguardia arranged an interview with him in Madrid on December 20 but he did not show up. All subsequent attempts at contact were futile. At the end of last week, El Independiente - directed by former El Mundo director Casimiro García-Abadillo - published an interview with Ortega in which he predicts that he will reopen the case.
In addition to Zougam, there are two other prisoners from 11-M in Spain. One is the former Asturian miner José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who supplied Rubber 2 to the terrorists, and who has just requested euthanasia, due to the lack of treatment for his mental health, he alleges.
The third is Othman El Gnaoui, imprisoned in León, who has the record for the sentence imposed in Spain: 42,922 years, as a necessary collaborator in 191 murders, almost 2,000 more in attempted murder, havoc, membership in an armed gang and others.
Abdelilah Hriz meets in Morocco. His DNA appeared in the house in Morata de Tajuña (where they set up the bombs) and also in the apartment in Leganés.
15 of the 18 convicted by the National Court in 2007 have complied. The latest were Rachid Aglif, sentenced to 18 years; Mohamed Bouharrat, 12 years for belonging to an armed gang; and in August the last one, Abdelmajid Bouchar. All those released from prison of Moroccan nationality were directly expelled to their country, and are prohibited from returning to Spain in 10 years, sources from the General Information Commissariat report.
Bouchar was sentenced to 18 years. Some witnesses believed they had seen it on the trains, but it was never proven.
Bouchar is the man who went down to throw out the garbage on the command floor on April 3. He detected the police (he had located them through a SIM card), raised the alarm and ran away. His alias was El Gamo because he was a great distance runner. They couldn't stop him until 2005, in Serbia.
In the 11-M trial he even denied having been in the apartment, although he was just unloading the trash, and in it there was a date stone on which his DNA was found.
He most certainly fled through the structure that the jihadists had in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, in a flat they called Al Kalaa, the fortress.
Al Kalaa was the escape route for several of the 3/11 terrorists. At least it was used by fellow members of the plot Mohamed Afalah, Daoud Ouhnane and Said Berraj.
The first two died fighting against the Americans in Iraq; Ouhnane in a shootout near Baghdad.
Berraj was a key member of Al Qaeda in Spain. Lives? The only reference to his subsequent fate is given in 2009, in the Operation Tigris trial, of the accused Khamal Ahbar. He claims that Berraj also died in Iraq.
But for police purposes “he is alive” because there is no biological evidence of his death, a high-ranking source in the anti-jihadist struggle explains to La Vanguardia.
Surely, Berraj knew a lot about both the preparation of the attacks and the plots of Al Qaeda in Spain.
This Moroccan had been detained in Istanbul in 2000, supposedly on his way to Afghanistan. He was there among others along with Amer Azizi (Al Qaeda's liaison on 11-M).
In 2001, both avoided arrests in Operation Dátil and in some way, according to the thesis of jihadism expert from the Elcano Royal Institute Fernando Reinares, they gave continuity to the cell that helped in Spain in the preparations for the American 9/11 with those of 9/11. -M Madrid.
Azizi played his role from abroad, perhaps from Pakistan. There he died in 2005, as confirmed by Al Qaeda itself in 2010, with a convoluted obituary, which included a photograph and several allusions to Isabella the Catholic for the expulsion of the Muslims in 1492.
Azizi was apparently betrayed by a confidant who allowed the CIA to launch a missile at them.
And Berraj? At the end of 2002, Spain had requested information from Türkiye to arrest him. The documentation reached Judge Baltasar Garzón on March 10. The day before the attacks.
The police searched his house in Madrid, but found it empty.
There he found a type of will, as published by El Confidencial, in which Berraj said: “I swear to God that I have had enough of this miserable life. How can you live and enjoy knowing that the enemies of Islam gather to fight against the Muslims…” He worked as a messenger.
Berraj travels to Malaga on March 8 to leave his wife, Hanane Chontouf, with his brothers-in-law. It is assumed that he returns to Madrid to participate in the massacre, given the telephone traffic, which places him in Morata de Tajuña, where the bombs are set up, and because he intervenes in the rental of a third property of the command, in Albolote (Granada), from where it is assumed that they would have continued their criminal route.
It was later found that the cell phone his wife used was 12 numbers away from that of Mohamed Belhadj, in whose name the apartment in Leganés was rented.
On March 23, according to what Berraj's brother-in-law said when he was arrested days later (and released without charges), he traveled with Hanane from Malaga to Barcelona; Hanane's brother worked in a restaurant in Alt Empordà, who did not want to explain to La Vanguardia if he is still there.
A brother-in-law of Berraj, detained by the police (he was also released), declared on April 4, 2004 that he had asked him for money, apparently to send Hanane to Morocco.
In a call to his brother Ahmed, who lives in Belgium, Said promised that he would surrender. He never did.
The point is that Berraj also used Al Kalaa to flee to Iraq. He left with Afalah, Ouhnane and a third party whose identity is unknown.
Did he die with them?
Officer or police officer is alive.
If so, he would be the only one who could tell everything about 11-M.
