The Minister of the Interior has inaugurated the exhibition ’20 años del 11M. Memory of Pain and Solidarity’, organised by the Victims of Terrorism Foundation and the Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the jihadist attack.

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Grande-Marlaska

The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, inaugurates the exhibition ’20 años del 11M. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, opens the exhibition ’20 años del 11M. Memory of Pain and Solidarity’.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has inaugurated the exhibition ’20 años del 11M. Memory of pain and solidarity’, organised by the Victims of Terrorism Foundation and the Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the jihadist attack perpetrated on 11 March 2004 in Madrid.

The exhibition is made up of 67 photographs from the graphic archive of the EFE Agency, selected by two journalists from the agency, Sagrario Ortega and Laura Camacho, who have curated the design of the exhibition, which will be open to the public until 21 March in the Plaza de la Armería in Madrid. It will then remain on display until 31 March in the Maruja Mallo exhibition hall in the capital, before moving to the Memorial Centre in Vitoria.

In his speech, Grande-Marlaska stressed that “the exhibition we have just visited combines two elements of a binomial formed by the press and the victims which, when aligned, consolidate one of the most solid social defence mechanisms in the face of terrorist aggression”.

The Minister of the Interior was joined at the opening ceremony by the President of Patrimonio Nacional (the organisation that owns the space where the exhibition is on display), Ana de la Cueva; the curators of the exhibition and the President of the Victims of Terrorism Foundation, Juan Benito Valenciano. Also in attendance were the President of the EFE Agency, Miguel Ángel Oliver; the Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, as well as representatives of the organisations and associations of victims of terrorism and the State Security Forces and Corps.

The Minister of the Interior congratulated all those who have worked on the preparation of the exhibition “which is much more than the memory of what is still the biggest terrorist attack on European soil in the last century, because it really reflects the suffering but also the commitment and, in the end, the triumph of a society, the Spanish society, which did not hesitate for a second to demonstrate once again that there is no terrorism capable of breaking it”.

Nine chapters
The exhibition is structured around nine sections articulated around an image and an introductory text (Spanish-English) that helps to contextualise the informative content of the images that make up each chapter, which are as follows:

Introduction
On 11 March 2004, Madrid suffered the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on European soil. It left 193 dead and more than 2,000 injured, but also two memories: solidarity and an effective response to a tragedy of such magnitude.
Background
It was at the beginning of the 21st century that the threat of jihadist terrorism, almost unknown until then in the West, became apparent. On 11 September 2001, nineteen members of the Al Qaeda network hijacked commercial airliners to crash them into various targets, including the Twin Towers in New York.
The attack killed at least 2,996 people and injured 25,000. Much earlier, in 1985, Spain was the target of this type of terrorism, when a bomb at the ‘El Descanso’ restaurant in Torrejón de Ardoz killed 18 people.

The 11M attacks
It was 7:39 a.m. on 11 March 2004 when three bombs exploded on a train arriving at Atocha station from Guadalajara. Three minutes later, four more bombs exploded on a train 500 metres from the station, at Calle Téllez. Simultaneously, two other explosions were recorded at Pozo del Tío Raimundo station and a final one at Santa Eugenia station. Ten bombs on four trains running at rush hour, carrying hundreds of workers and students from the capital of Alcarria, Alcalá de Henares and the suburbs of Madrid.
The victims
The simultaneous explosion of ten backpack bombs in the four trains caused the death of 192 people: 34 perished in the Atocha train; 63 in front of Calle Téllez, 65 in the Pozo del Tío Raimundo station, 14 in Santa Eugenia and another 16 in different hospitals; the last of them was recognised in 2014 after a decade in a coma. To these 192 fatalities of 11M were added the sub-inspector of the Special Operations Group (GEO) of the National Police, Francisco Javier Torronteras, who died in the attack on the flat in Leganés (Madrid) on 3 April when seven members of the jihadist cell blew themselves up.

The dead belonged to 17 different nationalities, with the Spanish nationality, with 144 deaths, being the most affected. After the Spaniards, the origin of the largest number of fatalities was Romania, with 16 killed; Ecuador, with six; Bulgaria and Poland, with four; and Peru, with three.
The explosions injured 2,084 travellers. Almost a hundred people were left with a high degree of physical incapacity, which in many cases left them unable to work for life.
Madrid, a city of solidarity
11 March 2004 was the longest day for Madrid, but it was also the day on which the people of Madrid and the whole of Spain showed their solidarity and the effective response of the emergency services to an unprecedented massacre.
Neighbours in their pyjamas helped the wounded with whatever they could, citizens left their jobs and classes to donate blood or to transport those affected to hospitals, where many of the patients who were in hospital asked to be discharged voluntarily to leave their beds.

Taxis and buses turned into ambulances and free transport for families arriving at the morgue set up at Ifema, where hundreds of psychologists volunteered.
Hoteliers who gave up their rooms to relatives; doctors, nurses, firemen, police and forensic experts who volunteered to help in the field hospitals such as the one set up in the ‘Daoiz y Velarde’ sports centre, one of the emblems of the immediate response to the attack which, barely 500 metres from Atocha, attended to 250 people, ten of whom died there.
The attack did not paralyse Madrid, which, pained, serenely revolted against the barbarity without falling into the trap of racism, xenophobia and hatred.
The reactions
A wave of grief and solidarity swept across Spain, dumbfounded by the magnitude of the massacre, and crossed borders in a unanimous cry against terrorist barbarity. The government decreed three days of mourning and flags were flown at half-mast in all the country’s institutions.

Meanwhile, in a spontaneous reaction, citizens built makeshift altars of candles, flowers and white hand signs at the stations where the bombs exploded. Thousands of people passed through them, powerless, unwilling to forget what happened.
The judicial process
The investigation into the bloodiest terrorist action ever committed in Spain began on the day of the attacks and led the National Court judge Juan Del Olmo to indict 116 defendants. In the end, 29 were tried, for whom the prosecution requested a total of 270,885 years in prison.
Two years later, on 2 July 2007, the trial, which had begun four and a half months earlier in facilities set up by the National Court in Madrid’s Casa de Campo, was scheduled for sentencing. On 31 October 2007, the Audiencia Nacional handed down a sentence that made it clear that the attack was the work of jihadist-type terrorist cells or groups.
The mark of terrorism in Madrid

Madrid is the region in Europe most affected by terrorism, with more than 400 fatalities due to attacks by different organisations (ETA, GRAPO or ultra-right-wing groups), to which thousands of people have been injured. But it is Jihadist terrorism that has caused the greatest number of victims in Madrid; just two attacks (against the ‘El Descanso’ restaurant in Torrejón de Ardoz and the 11M attack) have killed 211 people and injured more than 2,100. This exhibition pays tribute to all the victims.
In Memoriam
A single photograph shows the wreath laying during the tribute in memory of the victims of 11M held in the Forest of Remembrance in El Retiro Park to mark the ninth anniversary of the terrorist tragedy.
“This exhibition is an act of propaganda for values that we all share, such as freedom, pluralism and peace. These are values that we must spread everywhere to generate a culture of coexistence and respect for others and, in particular, for those who profess beliefs or ideas different from our own, because they are essential values for building a democratic system of peaceful coexistence such as the one we want for Spain”, concluded the Minister of the Interior after visiting the exhibition.