Laura Vega

Description

On 11 March 2004, Laura Vega got up early to go to work. She had to take a suburban train from Parla to Atocha, where she changed lines to travel on to the north of the city. It was a wintry morning. She left her home in a town south of Madrid to go to her office, as she did every day. After getting off the commuter train, she headed for the station. She was twenty minutes away from her destination. However she never reached the office.

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 went off between 7.37 and 7.39 am, when the trains were at Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations and alongside Calle Téllez. One hundred and ninety-one people were killed outright 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. One of the officers was killed in the ensuing blast.

Ten years after the attack, Laura Vega became the last of the 193 fatal victims of the 11 March bombings. After the attack, she was admitted to the Doce de Octubre hospital in Madrid with severe traumatic brain injury. She underwent surgery, but doctors soon told her parents that she was unlikely to come out of the coma. She remained in a vegetative state for the next ten years, finally passing away in 2014.