On the evening of the attacks, the alarm of a mobile phone rang in a sports bag that had been recovered from one of the bombed trains and taken to a police station. Police had thought it was luggage belonging to one of the victims. When they opened the bag they discovered it was a bomb. It was not clear why it had not exploded.

Even so, Zougam and his brother apparently got on well with their Spanish neighbours, who were as shocked as Moroccan residents over the arrests.
"They are a charming family," said a Spanish man who lives in the same block of flats but did not want to be named. "Not at all fundamentalists. None of the women wore headscarves and the two sisters are ... attractive, modern women."

Others wondered why Zougam would have remained in Madrid after the bombings, had he really been involved in planning them. Even if he had initially assumed that all the evidence would be destroyed, surely he would have fled after it was reported that one of the bombs had been found intact with a mobile phone from his shop inside?

It might not add up to anything, but the accounts of witnesses on trains bombed on March 11 were harder to ignore. At least two people who were shown photographs of suspects pointed to one of Zougam. They said they had seen him at the station of Alcala de Henares, where the doomed trains started their journeys.