Anca Valeria Bodea

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Anca Valeria Bodea had come to Spain barely two months before, on 7 January, from Oradea, in Transylvania. There she had studied French philology and worked as a secretary. In January 2004 she arrived in Spain, where she stayed with three brothers who were also from Romania. She began going out with one of them, Eugene. After spending a month in San Sebastian, she moved to Guadalajara and got a job as a nanny for a family living in Majadahonda. She commuted to work on the suburban train. Days before the 11th March, she told her boyfriend that she had a premonition something bad was going to happen and she asked him to come back.

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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