March 11, 2004 was a sad day for all Spaniards, a day that was engraved with bombs, blood and dead in the minds and hearts of all of us who live in this country.
I still remember the first moments of bombing, nobody knew who had planted the bombs and why. We were all listening on the radio, waiting for the number of fatalities to stop, but it did not stop, and the figure continued to rise until it reached the terrifying figure of 193 people and almost two thousand people suffered injuries of varying degrees.
We all look towards ETA because you will have from the terrorist group there were very bloody and despicable attacks, like the one in Hipercor, but when Arnaldo Otegi said that ETA had not been, we wondered who was behind the attacks.
The government, headed by Interior Minister Ángel Acebes, insisted that ETA was the author of the attacks, when the media, headed by the SER network, claimed that those responsible could be jihadists. This was confirmed.
The government maintained its position that those responsible should be sought in the terrorist group ETA, because the elections were just a stone's throw away. On March 14 there were elections and the government did not want the attacks to be related to Spain's intervention in the war in Iraq, but there is no doubt that this was the reason.
However, the lie cost them dearly. The Popular Party lost the elections of March 14, 2004, for trying to manipulate the bloodiest attack that has occurred in Spain to win an election.
Fifteen years later, with a police investigation of the most arduous, with a trial with thousands of pages and two judgments, one from the National High Court and the other from the Supreme Court, some still maintain that everything is still unclear in relation to the 11M attacks, which are still loose ends. These approaches are miserable and are an insult first to justice and then to each and every one of the victims of that terrible attack.
Yes, those who still doubt the authorship of the 11M attacks are miserable, because they only look for the electoral revenue, without thinking about the pain they cause to the victims and the damage they cause to the prestige of the Spanish justice system. It seems, like then, that they are only interested in winning an election, importing very little of the truth of what happened on March 11, 2004.
