A demonstrator at Spain’s El Pozo train station during a gathering in memory of the victims of the Madrid train blasts. (AFP)

Vienna, March 12 (Reuters): What if it was al Qaida?

Security analysts said today the jury was still out on the possible involvement of Islamist militants in the Madrid train bombings, for which a group aligned to al Qaida claimed responsibility in an email to an Arab newspaper.

Spain said Basque separatist group ETA was to blame for the bombs that killed nearly 200 people. But after the discovery of a stolen van with detonators and taped verses from the Quran, the government said no lines of inquiry could be ruled out. If al Qaida or related militant Islamists were involved, the implications would be enormous: the first such strike in the heart of Europe, and the first in the West since the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

It would show that the network, after confining itself for the past two-and-a-half years to attacks in mainly Muslim countries like the Gulf, north Africa, Turkey and southeast Asia, was capable of hitting “the heart of crusader Europe” and girding for a fresh blow against America, if the email to al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper is to be taken at face value.

And it would raise the threat level to European nations such as Britain, Italy and Poland which closely aligned themselves with the US in its war on terror and sent their troops to Iraq.

Whoever actually planned the strikes, killing civilians en masse and at random bears the signature of the modern militant age ushered in by al Qaida.

“This kind of operation is the style of terrorism of our century...That’s the new modus operandi coming from militant Islamists,” said German security analyst Rolf Tophoven, contrasting the indiscriminate mode of the attacks with ETA’s traditional targeting of bankers, politicians or police.

Roland Jacquard, head of the International Terrorism Observatory in Paris, said yesterday’s bombings suggested the influence of “the World Trade Center effect” on the strategies of traditional militant groups — a reference to the September 11 attacks for which al Qaida is blamed.

Manuel Coma, security expert at Spain’s Royal Elcano Institute, suggested Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida network had caused a kind of global terror inflation. “Since September 11, there has been a qualitative leap. Small attacks are no longer adequate. They (ETA) have to aim higher to have influence,” he said.

Other experts, however, are wary of jumping to conclusions.

“The jury is still out,” said Sebestyen Gorka, a security analyst based in Hungary. He said if he was “60-40” inclined yesterday to blame ETA, this had now slipped to 50-50.

He said the attacks were neither classic ETA nor classic al Qaida, and the claim of responsibility was a little too neat. “Al Qaida is well known for either not accepting responsibility or doing so very late,” he said, adding the email was “a little bit too fast, a little bit too clear”.

David Claridge of Janusian Security Risk Management in London said: “There are clues in both directions. The Spaniards seem quite determined to insist it’s ETA...(but) the style, everything about it seems to point to Islamists.”

If al Qaida were involved, he said: “It has massive implications...It’s potentially Europe’s 9/11 in terms of a wake-up call.”

Al Qaida involvement would raise big questions about European intelligence services and governments who had not alerted people by raising threat levels.