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Spain Links 3 Moroccans and 2 Indians to Bomb Case
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and ELAINE SCIOLINO

ADRID, March 13 - Spain announced Saturday evening that it has arrested five people in connection with terrorist train bombings that killed 200 people and injured 1,400 others.

Interior Minister Ángel Acebes told a hastily convened news conference that three Moroccans and two Indians were arrested in Madrid in connection with the sale and falsification of a telephone and its phone card attached to an unexploded bomb in one of the trains. Two other Spaniards of ``Indian origin'' were being questioned, he added.

Mr. Acebes stressed that ``the investigation had just begun'' and that it was ``too early to make a determination that they are linked to Islamic groups.'' But he said that this development ``opens an important piece of the investigation.''

In response to a question, Mr. Acebes revealed that some of those arrested may have links to ``Moroccan extremist groups.''

Special national police units are searching homes and businesses for more leads, he said.

The center-right government of José María Aznar has been under extraordinary pressure both inside the government and among its political opponents to conduct an open investigation as the country prepares to go to the polls on Sunday.

Initially, the government said with seeming certainty that ETA was responsible but day by day has added qualifiers to that pronouncement.

Mr. Acebes defended his government's handling of the investigation, saying, ``Sixty hours after the brutal attack we have five arrests.''

In an interview earlier Saturday, Ignacio Astarloa, secretary of state for security in the Interior Ministry, acknowledged that officials investigating the train bombings on Thursday found themselves hampered by fingerprints so muddled they may be useless and evidence that is both contradictory and confusing, a senior Spanish official said Saturday.

``We keep finding things in this investigation that take us to one side and then other things that take us to another.''

Earlier in the day, Mr. Astarloa said the government continued to focus primarily on ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, as the chief suspect in the investigation. But he added, a point underscored in a news conference today by Mr. Acebes, that investigators are also vigorously investigating information that could implicate a militant Islamic group - even Al Qaeda.

The most important clue by far was the unexploded bomb found in a gym bag on one of the trains. Mr. Astarloa called its discovery ``a blessing'' because, he said, ``it is the only bag planted by the terrorists that allows us to investigate something that isn't just ashes.''

A cellphone found in the gym bag presumably led to the arrests. The bag also contained a detonator and about 20 pounds of explosives as well as shrapnel on one of the trains that the terrorists attacked, he said.

The unexploded bomb, which he said was believed to have been connected to an alarm clock function on the phone, failed to go off. Mr. Astarloa said that one hypothesis was that the phone had not been properly activated.

He said that ETA had detonated bombs using mobile phones but that typically the trigger had been a call to the phone, not an alarm. The phone was not a brand used by ETA in the past, he added.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Acebes, the Interior Minister, said for the first time that the attack could have involved cooperation between ETA and another terrorist group.

``Of course you can't rule out at the moment that terrorist organizations of this type have coalitions, reach agreements, help each other,'' he said when asked a question about possible ETA links with radicals in Iraq.

Spain has reached out for help to the intelligence ser

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As investigators continued piecing together the evidence, people in Spain prepared to vote Sunday in general parliamentary elections, which will forever be linked with the terrorist attack on Thursday.

The bombings are expected to galvanize voters to come to the polls in a sign of newfound unity and purpose - to rally against terrorism - and many political analysts predict a record-high turnout.

It has been widely predicted that the winner of the parliamentary election will be the Popular Party, now headed by the departing Prime Minister JosÀe MarÀia Aznar, which has been ahead in public opinion surveys for months. It is unclear whether the party will retain its absolute parliamentary majority.

If the Popular Party wins against the Socialists, Mr. Aznar's handpicked successor, Mariano Rajoy, will take the helm. He has hefty political experience but minimal charisma and would be thrust into leadership at a time of chaos and uncertainty.

``The people are in shock,'' said Victor PÀerez-DÀiaz, a political science professor at the University of Madrid. ``And there will be a reaction. There will be a new sense of firmness, of determination, of resolution.''

With no clear sense of who is responsible for the carnage, few people are willing to gauge the public mood and dissect how it could influence political opinion and actual votes in Sunday's election.

Campaigning was suspended on Thursday, bringing an eerie silence to the frenetic political activity that typically leads up to an election.

An Islamic militant group sent a letter claiming responsibility to an Arabic-language newspaper in London on Thursday. The police also found in the van a cassette tape in Arabic of chanted verses from the Koran, followed by interpretative commentary, a type of educational tape that is sold widely at mosques and Islamic bookstores.

But government officials said the tape could have been put there as a decoy. ``We don't know whether those things were planted to throw us off the track of ETA,'' Mr. Astarloa said.

The bomb hidden in the gym bag was built with a Spanish-made explosive, known as Goma 2-E, a gelatinous, nitroglycerin-based explosive that is typically used in mining, that ETA has not used in the recent past, Mr. Astarloa said.

He said investigators were working on the assumption that Goma 2-E was the substance used in all of the explosions.

Like the unexploded bomb, 9 of the 10 bombs that exploded contained about 20 pounds of explosives; the tenth was believed to be about 40 pounds, he said.

In a call to a Basque radio station and newspaper, ETA denied playing a role in the bombings on Friday. Some Basque political leaders have expressed outrage over Mr. Aznar's allegations, accusing him of political trickery to increase his party's chances in the elections on Sunday and have demanded proof that ETA was involved.

In Europe and the United States, security was heightened, a reaction to the uncertainty over who was behind the attacks.

``This is the new menace of our time,'' British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a Labor Party conference on Saturday.

Talking to CNN, President Bush offered help to the Spanish government in tracking down the killers and said it was too early to know who was responsible. ``I wouldn't rule anybody out,'' he said.

Political analysts say people are now likely to cast their votes on Sunday through the filter of terrorism, which has been a longstanding issue here, instead of the vigorous economy.

Conventional wisdom here dictates that if the culprits are ETA, then Mr. Aznar's party stands to gain votes in the election, since he has never swayed from his tough line on the group.

If those responsible are Islamic militants, it is expected that Mr. Aznar will be blamed for supporting the war in Iraq, which 90 percent of the people here opposed, and putting Spain in the cross hairs of terrorist attacks.