Spain honors victims of Madrid train bombings on 6th anniversary of massacre

Spain marks 6th anniversary of Madrid bombings

MADRID — Hours after terrorist bombs ripped through Madrid commuter trains six years ago Thursday, an outpouring of grief engulfed the city, with people flocking to makeshift shrines to leave tokens of mourning.

Now, as part of the commemorations of the massacre, a government research body has completed a sociological study and compiled an archive of around 70,000 items deposited at the shrines.

The archive, to be housed in the state rail company’s museum, was unveiled this week before memorial ceremonies on Thursday’s anniversary.

Some of the items at the archive include children’s drawings of people with saddened faces, broken trains, trees, doves and words with messages of peace and sympathy left at Atocha rail station and other targeted sites for the 191 dead and 1,800 injured.

One message scrawled by an 11-year-old said, “You’ll be always be here, even if you’re in a different place.”

The trove also includes T-shirts worn by rescue workers that day, religious icons, poems, quotes from rock songs, toy, and even a bathing cap signed by the members of the national synchronized swimming team. Tens of thousands of people wrote messages on computer terminals set up for them to express their condolences.

“We felt that these type of ephemeral voices are usually left out of the memory of what happens in these cases, and we wanted to say that these reactions are also important in telling the story,” said Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, an anthropologist at the Spanish National Research Council who headed the project, called the Archive of Mourning.

The massacre was Europe’s worst Islamic terror attack. The attackers targeted the Madrid commuter train network with 10 shrapnel-filled bombs concealed in backpacks during the morning rush hour of March 11, 2004. Twenty-eight people, mainly from North Africa, went on trial in 2007 and 21 of them were convicted of taking part in the attacks.

Sanchez-Carretero said she was most surprised by the things some people used to vent their feelings.

“There was a recently used tablecloth, as if it just came off the table, and also a window curtain,” she added. Both had inscriptions on them.

The outpouring, she said, forms part of a trend of grass roots reactions to calamities and compare with those that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. or Princess Diana’s death in 1997.

“In the United States, the American flag was the most important symbol used in the spontaneous shrines,” she said. “The overriding plea at the Madrid shrines was one for peace. The most common message left was, ‘We were all on those trains.’”

Lawmakers, meanwhile, observed a minute’s silence at the Congress of Deputies.

“Remembering saves us, and protects against a second crime, which would be that of oblivion,” parliamentary speaker Jose Bono said before the silence. “No one dies completely, so long as they are not forgotten.”