MINISTER: DRUG SALES FINANCED BOMBINGS

MADRID, Spain - The Islamist extremists responsible for the Madrid train
bombings financed their plot with sales of hashish and "ecstasy" and drank
holy water from Mecca in ritual "purification acts" before the attacks, the
acting interior minister, Angel Acebes, said Wednesday.

In a final news conference before the newly elected Socialist government
takes office, Acebes described the March 11 terror attacks as a local,
independently organized operation led by people with "connections to other
fundamentalist groups in Europe and outside Europe."

He said the group might have been influenced by a supreme leader "with more
experience with radical Islam," and possibly training in Afghanistan. But
he said much of the plot had been carried out with the help of petty criminals.

Using common drug traffickers as intermediaries, Acebes said, the bombers
swapped the ecstasy and hashish for the 440 pounds of dynamite used in the
blasts that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,400 others in the
Spanish capital. Money from the drug trafficking paid for an apartment
hide-out, a car and the cell phones that were used to detonate the bombs,
an Interior Ministry representative said.

The explosives, Acebes added, were taken from a coal mine in the Asturias
region of northern Spain and transported in a Volkswagen to a rundown
property outside Madrid, where they were assembled as bombs and placed in
backpacks.

The leaders of the operation, evidently concerned about the effects of
their plot on their souls, "swallowed holy water from Mecca," Acebes said.
"They met periodically to carry out purification acts that would legitimize
the committing of acts that could offend Islam."

Acebes said the man in charge of the group's finances was Jamal Ahmidan, a
33-year-old Moroccan immigrant with an "extensive criminal record for drug
trafficking."

Ahmidan was identified as one of seven suspects who blew themselves up
April 3 in a Leganes apartment building, in suburban Madrid, rather than
turn themselves in to police. At least three bodies have not yet been
identified.

The ideological mastermind of the bombing, and leader of the purification
ceremonies, was a 30-year-old Moroccan immigrant named Jamal Zougam, Acebes
said. Zougam was one of 18 people sent to prison since the bombings, most
of them Moroccan, he said. Zougam was mentioned but not charged in an
indictment by an investigating judge, Baltasar Garzon, in connection with
the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Acebes said the operational chief and coordinator of the bombings was a
37-year-old Tunisian named Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, a former
economics student at Madrid's Autonomous University who worked for a real
estate office and was married to a 17-year-old Moroccan woman. Fakhet
"recruited participants at some of the Madrid mosques in which he led some
of the prayers," Acebes said. He was killed in the Leganes explosion, which
also left one police officer dead.

All those responsible for the attacks are either behind bars or dead,
Acebes said. The piece of the puzzle still missing, however, is whether a
supreme leader, or emir, oversaw the operation from a distance, Acebes said.