http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=535&ncid=535&e=13&u=/ap/20040703/ap_on_re_eu/spain_looking_for_answers

Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has indicted bin Laden and 40 other terror suspects, said last week that Spain and other nations cannot handle this kind of organization. The network, he said, has "a structure that is absolutely horizontal and diffuse," and its cells need no instructions on when or what to attack.

As to motive, Reinares said the train bombings were probably not so much prompted by the previous government's support for the Iraq (news - web sites) war as by the crackdown Spain waged on Islamic extremists after the Sept. 11 attacks. Spain was a key staging ground for Sept. 11, along with Germany.

Among things authorities do know is that in exchange for a relatively small amount of money — perhaps a few thousand dollars — and 70 pounds of hashish, the Madrid cell obtained high-grade dynamite from a gang of Spanish criminals in Asturias, a northern mining region.

Jamal Ahmidan, the Moroccan who allegedly negotiated the explosives deal, and Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a former miner who had access to dynamite, met for the first time in Madrid at a fast-food restaurant.

Ahmidan was among the seven suspects who killed themselves on April 3 by blowing up their suburban Madrid apartment as special forces prepared to storm it. So was another alleged ringleader, Tunisian Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet.

Spaniards have been flabbergasted by revelations — confirmed by the judge leading the probe — that both the Moroccan who introduced Ahmidan to Suarez Trashorras and Suarez Trashorras himself were police informants.

In Asturias, dynamite is sold on the black market to poachers who use it to fish.

Suarez Trashorras and his wife, Carmen Toro Castro, told investigators they'd been in contact with their police overseer, an officer in the town of Aviles named Manuel Garcia Rodriguez, about a group of Moroccans seeking explosives.

Days after the March 11 bombings, 23-year-old Toro Castro called the police inspector, whose nickname is Manolo, in a state of panic.

"Manolo, I think we screwed up," she said in a wiretapped conversation quoted by the newspaper El Mundo. "I think the ones with the explosives were ours."

Toro Castro was arrested but released, although she is still considered a suspect. Her husband remains in jail.