Wieslaw Rzaca

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Wieslaw Rzaca had emigrated to Spain from his native Poland with his wife. Here they had had a daughter Patricia, who was seven months old at the time of the attack. The three used to take the train from Vallecas to Atocha, where the couple would leave the little girl in the care of an aunt while they went to work. They had just bought a house in Poland and planned to move back in a few months. On the morning of 11 March 2004, the father and the little girl were both killed at El Pozo station.

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 blast killed one of the officers, bringing the total number of people killed by the 11 March killers to 192.

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