Thousands of people in Spain attended events on Monday to mark the 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history, when 10 bombs went off on full commuter trains in the Madrid region, killing 193 people and injuring almost 2,000.
“This date unites us in a memory that is both personal and public at the same time, and that does not wane with time,” King Felipe VI said at a ceremony to mark European Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism which falls on the date of the Madrid bombings but recalls all terrorist attacks.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said remembrance had to be a motivation for the present and future “so that something like that is never repeated.”
European Union Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, attending the commemoration event, said that attacks like that on Madrid were an attack “on all of us.”
Survivors of other terrorist attacks in Europe spoke of their suffering and of the solidarity that they had experienced.
At the central Madrid event on the Puerta del Sol square, Vera de Benito, who lost her father in the bombings, thanked the people of Spain for their solidarity.
“My father and I were a special duo. I wish he could be here today,” De Benito, who was a little girl at the time, said. “They can take our relatives, but never our memories,” she said.
Spain’s security agencies at the time underestimated Islamist terrorism, as they were focusing on ETA, the Basque separatist group.
They nevertheless quickly tracked the bombers down to the Madrid suburb of Leganés, where seven men blew themselves up in their apartment as police closed in. A police officer died in the blast.
The attacks and their aftermath divided the country, with Spain’s participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 held responsible for the rise in Islamist terror by many on the left.
A Spanish general election was held on March 14, 2004. It brought José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to power, head of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).
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