Right-wing Popular Party attacks Spain’s leading judge Baltasar Garzón.

The attacks on Garzón started after he alleged in early October that three police forensic experts, Manuel Escribano, Pedro Manrique and Isabel Lopez, dishonestly signed and changed the date of a report in order to suggest that new evidence had emerged linking the Basque separatist group ETA to the March 11, 2004, train bombing in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured 1,900 others. The officers’ superiors had already rejected the report in 2005 because it was based on flimsy evidence.

The report was promoted in El Mundo, a newspaper close to the PP, which has taken a leading role in the right-wing campaign to destabilise the Socialist Party (PSOE) government. It claimed an Islamist suspect arrested in December 2004 in connection with the Madrid bombings must have received the same training as an ETA commander whose apartment was raided in Salamanca in 2001 because police had found the chemical boric acid (a constituent in the explosive Amonal used by ETA) in their homes. The evidence was thrown out because boric acid is used in many products such as antiseptics and insecticides that can be found in most households.

The PP’s obsession with proving a connection between the Madrid bombings and ETA is linked with the PSOE’s election to power three days after the bombings. The PSOE was the undeserving beneficiary of the massive opposition to the PP government’s support for the war in Iraq and its anti-working class social policies. Aware that millions would correctly blame the PP’s participation in the war for creating the conditions for an atrocity perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists, the PP sought to blame ETA for the outrage. This backfired as evidence of Al Qaeda involvement came to light and became the focus for seething opposition to the PP. Ever since, the PP has refused to recognise the election results and describes the PSOE as an illegitimate government, with the support of the right-wing media, sections of the military and the Catholic Church.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/spai-n09.shtml