Morocco to Madrid, A Bomb Suspect Grew Radicalized follows the life of Jamal Zougam:
Three years ago, Spain’s national police stormed the apartment of Jamal Zougam, a 30-year-old Moroccan immigrant who ran a cellphone business in Madrid. Among items they seized: phone numbers for suspected terrorists, a video of Islamic warriors fighting Russian troops near Chechnya, and four books in Arabic on aspects of jihad, such as how to treat prisoners of war.The raid followed a request by a French magistrate who suspected Mr. Zougam was involved in terrorism. But the Spanish police figured the evidence wasn’t strong enough to arrest Mr. Zougam, or even to seek a judge’s permission for a wiretap.
Now Mr. Zougam is the prime suspect in last week’s bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 202 people and injured many more. An unexploded bomb had a trigger that used a cellphone police traced to Mr. Zougam’s store, which Spanish authorities have reason to believe had long operated as part of an al Qaeda cell that provided logistical help to Islamists across Europe.
Remind me to stay out of Lavapies:
Around 1996, he and his half-brother, Mohamed Chaoui — also arrested in Spain after the train bombing — opened a fruit shop in the central-Madrid neighborhood of Lavapies. This area is a tumult of different languages and attire, and is one of the more violent parts of the capital, where a few years ago North Africans and Chinese waged ax fights in the streets.