Patricia Rzaca

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Seven-month-old Patricia Rzaca travelled every morning with her parents from the Vallecas district to Atocha station. The couple, of Polish origin, used to leave her with her aunt while they went to work. They had just bought a house in Poland and planned to return in a few months. The girl and her father, Wieslaw, were killed in the explosions at El Pozo station. Patricia was the youngest person to be killed in the Madrid bombings.

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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