AFTER the horror of the Madrid train bombs, the accusations of deceit that followed, the shock defeat of the government, the calls to bring home the troops from Iraq and the gradual coming to terms with one of the worst atrocities to blight mainland Europe in recent history, life in Spain had begun to regain a sense of normality.
But any hope that the worst might be over was shattered on Friday when a bomb, primed for destruction, was found partially buried beneath a stretch of track on the country’s high- speed rail network.
Police had issued warrants for the arrest of s
ix men thought to have played key roles in planning the 11 March attacks that left 191 dead, and the country remained on high alert for more terror attacks.
Those fears were confirmed on Saturday when the remaining members of the cell that had planned the attacks in Madrid were traced to a flat on the outskirts of the Spanish capital.
A combination of luck and painstaking detective work had brought police to the working- class area of Leganes, where residents were yesterday struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that terrorists had been living among them.
"I can’t believe they were living here and none of us knew what they were up to. How disgusting. We feel indignant, afraid, helpless," said one woman standing in the crowd that had gathered outside the ruined block, where at least five suspected terrorists blew themselves up to avoid capture on Saturday night.
"Nowhere is safe. If this could happen here it could happen anywhere," said another.
The discovery of an unexploded bomb after the Madrid attack has yielded sufficient evidence for police to announce that virtually every member of the terror group responsible for the bombing is now either in custody or dead.
Spanish newspaper El Pais said police swooped on the house in the suburb of Leganes after a suspect activated a mobile-phone SIM card, tipping off investigators to his whereabouts.
Police knew about a batch of pre-paid SIM cards that were probably in the possession of the bombers after one of them was recovered from the unexploded bomb.
An interior ministry spokesman yesterday declined to confirm the detail about an activated SIM card, saying: "We don’t want the bad guys to know what we know." But neither did he deny it was true.
The unexploded bomb was found by chance. Without it, investigators would only know a fraction of what they now know with nearly all the suspected culprits dead or in jail.
Ten bombs aboard four packed commuter trains exploded almost simultaneously on 11 March. Three other bombs that did not go off were destroyed on the spot in controlled explosions - standard procedure by police concerned they could have been detonated by remote control or timer in order to kill emergency crews responding to the first set of blasts.
But one more dud - the 14th bomb - went undetected for 12 hours until a mobile-phone alarm sounded amid luggage that had been taken from the bombed trains to a police station. The alarm was rigged to trigger the detonator but the bombers had mistakenly set it for 7:40pm instead of 7:40am, when the other devices exploded on the trains.
Had the detonator functioned, it would have blown up the police station. Instead police were able to examine the device for evidence and learn vital details of the methods and materials used to carry out the attacks.
Police traced the phone’s SIM card to a small mobile- phone shop in the multi-ethic Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapies.
From there, police arrested the shop’s three owners, all of whom have been formally accused of 190 murders and at least 1,400 attempted murders.
Evidence gathered at the shop has led to all 24 arrests so far. Nine of those have been set free, leaving 15 in jail.
It was the activation of another card from the batch which led police to the flat in Leganes where, it appears, terrorists were in the final stages of carrying out another attack on a country that had dared to hope the worst had passed.
