A Spanish trial began today of 29 people charged with involvement in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people three years.
The morning rush hour attacks on March 11, 2004, killed 191 people.
Twenty Arab men and nine Spaniards face charges ranging from terrorist murder to stealing dynamite from mines to sell to the bombers, often in exchange for drugs.
The accused who had been in custody awaiting trial sat in a bullet-proof glass box as a clerk read out their names. The other 11 sat in open court. They have all pleaded not guilty.
Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, accused of inciting people to carry out the bombings, was first to be led to the stand and initially refused to give any evidence.
Ahmed, known as "Mohamed the Egyptian", faces charges that carry sentences of more than 38,000 years. The maximum anybody can serve in Spain is 40 years.
"I know nothing about these accusations," said Ahmed, who was convicted of belonging to a terrorist group by an Italian court last year.
"With all respect, I am not going to answer any questions even from my lawyer," he said through an interpreter.
He later changed his mind and will take questions from his defence after a lunch break.
Blanca Aponte, a lawyer for a victims' association, said she expected most defendants not to answer prosecutors' questions.
Dressed in jeans and a white jacket, Ahmed sat back in his chair while state prosecutor Olga Sanchez asked why and when he came to Madrid, and challenged him about comments he allegedly made that the March 11 bombings were "my plan".
Ahmed is one of four men the prosecutor singled out as the ideologues behind the bombs which ripped apart four commuter trains like tin cans and injured about 2,000 people, many of whom are still in treatment and have never returned to work.
Two other alleged masterminds will follow Ahmed on to the stand while the fourth was one of seven suspects who blew themselves up in an apartment block weeks after the attack.
The next man up is Youssef Belhadj, believed to be the man who appeared on a video, claiming the attack was revenge for Spain's support for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Three days after the bombs, Spain held a general election and voted out the conservative Popular Party (PP), which had backed the US-led war in Iraq and initially blamed the attacks on the Basque separatist group ETA.
The new Socialist government quickly fulfilled a pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.
The court hearings are expected to last until July when the three-judge panel will retire to consider the evidence. They are not expected to come out with their verdicts and sentences until October at the earliest.