Fear Factor

Gema Perez and her boyfriend Oscar Martínez were sitting in her parents' house watching the news at about 9 p.m. last Saturday night when they heard the massive explosion. "We were afraid and we cried," Pérez says. "We immediately thought it was terrorism." Looking out the window Pérez saw her neighbors in Leganés, a working-class suburb 12.5 km southwest of central Madrid, screaming and running away from the source of the blast. A block away from the Pérez's red-brick house, a bomb had blown the front and back off a five-story apartment building. According to Spain's Interior Minister Angel Acebes, the bomb went off as police stormed the building to arrest three men suspected of involvement in the March 11 Madrid train attacks. One eyewitness said shots were fired and the men shouted in Arabic before blowing themselves up, killing an antiterrorist police officer and wounding 11 others, some seriously. "We never thought something like this could happen here," Pérez says.

But the grim reality Europeans faced last week was that terrorist strikes can happen anytime, anywhere. Since the Madrid bombing, talk of terror has gone mainstream. Parents warn their children about how to escape from trains, or not to take public transportation at all; senior politicians debate how inevitable an attack has become. In Britain, 700 police swooped down on 24 addresses around London last week, arresting nine men and discovering in a self-storage warehouse nearly 500 kg of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — up to twice the amount in the bomb that killed 200 in Bali in October 2002. There was relief in the Spanish and British capitals that the security services seemed to have their hands around at least part of the problem. But it was terrifying that, sprinkled through suburban neighborhoods, were people allegedly plotting to blow up their neighbors.

In Madrid, Acebes said the men who blew themselves up in Leganés were of North African origin. Pedro Blasquez, the manager of the building in which the suspects died, said two men had rented the flat about a week ago. They were in their twenties and nondescript but didn't seem to have any furniture or luggage. "It was strange," Blasquez says. "They didn't move anything in." Earlier in the week, Spanish investigators identified a Tunisian man, Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, as "leader and coordinator" of the operation that led to the Madrid train blasts. On Friday, a Spanish railway worker spotted what turned out to be a bomb containing about 12 kg of explosives alongside a high-speed rail line 60 km south of Madrid. Spanish officials said it contained the same type of explosive material as that used in the Madrid attacks.

The London terror suspects had kept a low profile, too. They blended in completely: mechanics and caterers, fans of cricket and Manchester United, three teenagers, most in their early twenties. An added source of worry is that most, possibly all, of their families came from Pakistan, which so far has not contributed many foot soldiers to al-Qaeda operations in Europe. Officials and experts take that as evidence that a new front in the terror war may be opening — and because approximately three-quarters of British Muslims have roots in Pakistan and its neighbors, it could be a big one. Security agencies had been monitoring this group for months, apparently alerted by some of its members' contacts with Pakistan. Two are said to have attended training camps there run by Kashmiri militants. Authorities said they managed to infiltrate the gang, and though no al-Qaeda links have been proved, an official said, "the logic of previous attacks suggests a likelihood of overseas links."