It sounds as if New York City narrowly escaped another terrorist attack: a train bombing at the hands of the terrorists accused of last year’s bloody Madrid train bombings.
Hand-made drawings and other “highly specialized technical information” about the station were found on a computer disk seized from the home of one of the suspects, El Mundo reported, citing sources close to the investigation.
The disk was confiscated within two weeks of the attacks on March 11, 2004, that killed 191 people in Madrid, but Spanish investigators did not warn the FBI and the CIA until December when the full scope of the technical information became clear, El Mundo said.
“Prosecutors at the High Court have informed the FBI and the CIA that the perpetrators of the March 11 attacks had in their possession plans to attack Grand Central Station in New York,” it said.
No one was immediately available at the Interior Ministry to comment.
All of this raises the old cliche, which is a wise cliche: don’t let your guard down for one minute. Every citizen has to keep his/her eyes open because the terrorists look for moments when no one suspects the worst can happen.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.