A judge in Madrid found 21 people guilty Wednesday in the March 2004 terror bombings of commuter trains and acquitted seven others.

The 27 men and one woman had entered pleas of innocent to charges ranging from murder, forgery and conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack, a BBC correspondent reported.

The bombers used 10 backpacks stuffed with explosives and nails on March 11, 2004, to detonate on four packed commuter trains. The explosions killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800 others in what Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez ruled was a terror attack, the report said.

Two of the men were each sentenced to more than 40,000 years in prison, while another found guilty of supplying explosives from a mine was sentenced to more than 35,000 years in jail, a Deutsche Welle correspondent reported.

However, under Spanish law a person can serve no more than 40 years in prison.

The attackers were protesting the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, prosecutors said during the four-month trial.  // Copyright 2007 by United Press International



Publication date: 31 October 2007   

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