Francisco Javier Barahona Imedio

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On hearing the explosion on the train at Santa Eugenia station, which was close to her home, Amaparo Imedio went down to the garage to check whether her son, Francisco Javier Ibarra, had gone to work in Alcobendas by car or whether he had taken the train. When she saw that the car was still in the garage, the sixty-year old widow began to fear the worst. Her daughter, Lourdes, had to go to several hospitals and the improvised morgue at the Ifema exhibition centre before finally discovering that her brother had been killed on the train that had been blown up beside Calle Téllez.

11 March 2004 fell on a Thursday. Early that morning, a number of terrorists with links to Al-Qaeda planted thirteen bombs on four suburban trains covering routes running through Madrid. Ten of the bombs exploded between 7.37 and 7.39 am, when the trains were at Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations and alongside Calle Téllez. 191 people were killed in the attack and around 1,500 were wounded. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Spanish history. On 3 April 2004, agents from the Special Operations Group (GEO) were about to enter an apartment in Leganés where the perpetrators of the attacks were believed to be hiding when the terrorists detonated twenty kilograms of explosives in an act of collective suicide. The ensuing blast killed one of the officers, bringing the total number of people killed by the 11 March bombers to 192.

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