20 years ago today I was rudely awakened by a bomb going off about 200m from where I was sleeping in a nearby suburban railway train arriving at Atocha station, in what was to be one of the more surreal days of my life. I got off lightly, I was mildly inconvenienced. Around 2,050 people were injured and 193 people were killed by the bombs in the capital that morning.
Then the Aznar Spanish government spent the next three days lying blatantly to us about who had set the bombs, blaming the basque independence movement and ETA, rather than islamic terrorist groups who claimed authorship of attack, as retaliation for Spain joining the war on Iraq.
This was three days before the General Election, and lost it for Prime Minister Aznar, who until that point had a solid lead in the polls. The war on Iraq was an election issue, with opposition candidate and eventual winner of the election José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero having pledged to withdraw Spain from that war.
