El Descanso: Inquiry on a forgotten attack

The attack perpetrated in April 1985 -just 40 years ago- at the El Descanso restaurant, a roadside grill near Madrid, in which 18 people were killed and nearly a hundred wounded, remains, as the book's degree scroll says, a 'strange attack'. Its authorship is unknown (it was first claimed by a Lebanese Shiite group and days later by a Palestinian Sunni organization); although the goal may have been to kill members of the US Armed Forces stationed at the Torrejón de Ardoz base, the dead were civilians, none of them Americans (but it is possible that some Pentagon military personnel died, unofficially); the lack of clues prevented a trial, in a process reopened twice and soon closed again without any progress...

The book by Luis de la Corte Ibáñez, director programs of study the Strategic and Intelligence programs of study the research center in Forensic and Security Sciences of the Autonomous University of Madrid, does not solve the case, but it clarifies some of its aspects. The main contribution, in addition to a thorough review of the research reports and other details contained in the summary (the book is, in that sense, very much forensic), is the contextualization that the subtitle preaches. The book makes it understandable that in the Spain of the 1980s an attack perpetrated by Middle Eastern terrorists would fit perfectly, even though all the attention of Spaniards was then focused on ETA terrorism and the international violence generated as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict was perceived as alien to our borders.

The context of international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s and the episodes experienced in Spain itself -especially the settling of scores between nationals of different Arab countries- constitute the basis for the credibility of the attribution to some agent with links to the Middle East. The speed with which the external authorship was pointed out and the full acceptance of that possibility (unlike the imbroglio that took place with 11-M in 2004) gives reason to the reality of a context that the experts did take into account, but of which society was little aware.

Luis de la Corte explores all the threads of possible versions, getting to the end of those alleys and without betting on any theory that tries to present as true something about which the evidence is not conclusive. In this the work has special merit, since what the publishing house marketing would rather claim would be to defend a thesis and try to fit most of the pieces together.

The book includes a recent journalistic research published by 'La Vanguardia' that tries to confirm a rumor that already circulated in some circles and that assured that among the dead there were three or four American dead, one of them a high-ranking military officer: the recovery of the corpses would have been done secretly, with the approval of the Spanish authorities to proceed in this way. De la Corte delves into the reasons that could have advised such secrecy, based above all on the convenience for the United States of not appearing vulnerable and for Spain of not harming the options of entrance NATO (the referendum on membership was held just a year later). But without denying that this could have happened, De la Corte prefers not to consider this information as canonical as long as no documentary evidence emerges.

With a similar attitude, he accepts and traces the authorship claimed first by Islamic Jihad and then by WAAD, an unknown acronym that referred to the small group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Command (PFLP-CE), and analyzes a possible combination of both actors. It also follows the trajectory of some terrorists arrested as a result of other actions that could have been related to the El Descanso attack.

Finally, he dwells on the two reopenings of the research, one following the arrest of the arms dealer Al Kassar, which led to nothing, and the second caused by the public relevance achieved by Mustafa Setmarian, a Syrian nationalized Spanish citizen with close contact with the Al Qaeda leadership, which seemed more promising. One of the witnesses who was in El Descanso and helped to draw the sketch of the only suspect said in 2005, when he saw a photo of Setmarian in the press, that he was sure that this was the person who allegedly left a bag with the explosive in the restaurant; a second witness corroborated this resemblance. However, the research was closed again and De la Corte interprets that the investigators must have been confident enough to do so, since he relativizes the certainty with which the witnesses identified Setmarian twenty years after the attack.

The book reflects a great knowledge of the foundations and operations of the Jihad, an exquisite respect for the victims of terrorism, to whom he wishes to pay the recognition that they may sometimes lack, and a special effort of precision. The latter is the case, for example, when he warns against identifying what happened in El Descanso with the Islamist terrorism we have known in the world since the beginning of the century, since the 1985 attack and that of 11-M almost twenty years later are part of different waves of international terrorism.