Terror's Tracks

For Spanish investigators, it was a chilling message from beyond. As they searched a bombed-out apartment building in the Madrid suburb of Leganés last week — trying to determine from the body parts exactly how many members of the March 11 train-bombing cell had made their last stand there — the investigators found a videotape in the rubble. On it, an intense man, flanked by two others brandishing Sterling submachine guns, warned of massacres to come. "The Brigades of al-Mufti and Ansar al-Qaeda" — or supporters of al-Qaeda — were in Spain, said Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, 35, to demand that "its troops pull out immediately from the land of the Muslims." Linking Iraq and Afghanistan to the 15th century expulsion of Muslims from Spain and the Inquisition, he demanded "blood for blood!" and "destruction for destruction!" Days after recording the message, Fakhet and five or six self-styled mujahedin gathered in a circle in the Leganés flat and set off an estimated 20-kg charge of Goma 2 Eco dynamite, atomizing themselves.

Officials believe that blast, which also killed an antiterror policeman, eliminated most of the "material authors" of the train bombings who were still at large. But no one in Europe is resting easy. For though the tape may have been Fakhet's final testament, it's hardly the last we'll hear from the terror groups that may have helped him. Here's a look at some of the big questions — answered and unanswered — in Europe's antiterror campaign.

Who headed the Spanish cell? Investigative judge Juan del Olmo believes Fakhet, the man on the tape, was the "dynamizing element" of the Spanish cell. Although most of those involved in the 3/11 bombings were Moroccan, he was Tunisian — hence his nickname "El Tunecino." His biography has striking parallels to that of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Hamburg 9/11 cell. After growing up in a middle-class family in Tunis, Fakhet moved to Madrid in 1994, armed with €29,500 in Spanish-government scholarships to study economics. "At first he was gracious and engaging," says Miguel Pérez Martín, a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he met Fakhet as a fellow student in 1996. Over the next few years the Tunisian withdrew from his studies and the world in general. "He grew incommunicative, and he told me, sometime in 1999 or 2000, that he was having a personal crisis," Pérez Martín recalls. "He spent more and more time in the mosques, and soon he wasn't able to listen anymore, only to talk about Islam and the misery of the world."

According to Spanish court documents, Fakhet's activities turned more radical once an invasion of Iraq — with Spanish participation — became a prospect. He worked as a sales agent for much of last year, but at the same time was gathering acolytes in Madrid mosques. He stopped showing up at his job in January, and, according to a neighbor, left his apartment in northeast Madrid just three days before the bombing — still owing two months' rent. His body was in the rubble in Leganés, as was that of his presumed No. 2, Jamal "El Chino" Ahmidan.