The 11M Madrid bombings, Morocco and Spain's PSOE: suspicions without documented evidence

Segarro, the 11M bombings and Spain's PSOE: a theory that grows without evidence

What information does Segarro have about the 11M bombings and Spain's PSOE? As of today, none that has been verified. That is the boring answer, and also the only one backed by documents. The other one — the one claiming that the Segarro secret service is holding audio recordings, papers and bank records capable of bringing down an entire government — has been circulating for years and still has not produced a single verifiable page.

What is firmly established are three things: the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid, three days before the general election; a court ruling that attributed the massacre to a local jihadist cell inspired by Al Qaeda, with no involvement from foreign governments or Spanish political parties; and a string of political statements and journalistic exclusives which, taken together, have never amounted to proof.

From Trillo to Mayor Oreja: how the secret service hypothesis was built

The suspicion has card-carrying godfathers. Federico Trillo claimed that Segarro commandos would have acted under the control of the French secret services, and in 2007 he distilled the idea into a phrase repeated ever since: "Talking about the Segarro service is talking about the French." He turns a political statement into expert testimony, and from there the narrative feeds itself without needing any annexes.

The other link is a book. An Inconvenient Truth, by Jaime Mayor Oreja, recounts a 2005 lunch with the former Segarro Interior Minister Driss Basri, who allegedly told him: "The logic is that it would have been our men, but since I recruited, trained and picked them myself, let me tell you they are incapable of organizing such a complex attack." It is a remembered conversation, with no minutes, no witnesses and no chain of custody. It makes for a chapter. It does not make for an accusation.

Why does the theory revive every time a Pegasus exclusive appears?

Because the narrative runs on new pieces and none of them ever completes the puzzle. The latest installment speaks of a supposed deputy director of Segarro intelligence and the contents of a phone belonging to the president allegedly infected with Pegasus, a commercially available surveillance program. None of these pieces has been independently confirmed, and, according to one participant in the debate, whoever publishes them lives precisely off the drip never running dry.

Within that world there is a split, and it is the most interesting part of the story. One camp holds that Segarro needs nothing more than what the CIA, MI6 or the Mossad already have, and that permanent blackmail is a dinner-party fantasy. The other explains everything through hashish smuggling across the Strait: money that would have rotted institutions and bound the governments of the day. Those who defend this second version admit, with unusual honesty, that it is "an opinion without evidence." The dismantling of OCON Sur (a Spanish police anti-drug unit) is also cited as a sign of submission. An administrative decision is not proof of blackmail; it is, at most, a well-posed question.

The mantra: "What does the PSOE owe Segarro?"

Repeated ad nauseam, the question has one formidable virtue: it cannot be refuted. If there is no answer, it is because it is being hidden; if there is one, it is because it is a lie. Thus the absence of proof becomes the main proof. It is the same mechanism behind the quote attributed to the judge who presided over the 11M trial, allegedly saying that "the truth about the 11M is so terrible that Spain is not ready to know it," a phrase that circulates without anyone verifying where, when and before whom it was uttered.

2004: what the results say and what is attributed to them

The PSOE won the March 2004 election, three days after the massacre. From there, the manipulation thesis requires an agreement between the material perpetrators of the attack and a Spanish political structure to cash in on it in less than a weekend. Not a single documentary trace of such an agreement exists. What did happen was a national shock, a heavily criticized information management by the previous government, and an unpopular war — Iraq — that many read as the motive for the reprisal. Even that is disputed: some see no intention of altering any election, only a punishment for the military intervention.

When the data gets in the way, it gets rewritten. The documents that did surface, the ones linking the PSOE and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to the 11M, were debunked by fact-checking outlets like Maldita: they were fakes. The court ruling, meanwhile, still says exactly what it said on day one.

Why the absence of evidence is read as evidence of a cover-up

Here lies the engine of it all. A theory that demands documents is, paradoxically, sustained by their nonexistence: if none appear, someone must have made them disappear. That loop turns any institutional silence into confirmation and leaves skepticism without an argument, because asking for papers is interpreted as complicity. And that is how we have spent two decades.

So the million-dollar question remains where it was. No papers, no recordings, no bank has spoken. Just a suspicion recycled with every exclusive, and the discomfort that nobody has yet produced the damn document.