Madrid

BETWEEN MARCH 11, when terrorists linked to al Qaeda killed 191 Spanish commuters with bomb attacks on four trains, and March 14, when Spanish voters shocked the world by removing José-María Aznar's pro-war Popular party (PP) from power and electing the Socialist (PSOE) candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the world's attention was riveted on Spain. But soon dozens were arrested, and on April 3 another 7, believed to be the ringleaders, killed themselves with a bomb when their apartment in the Madrid suburb of Leganés was surrounded by police. One of the policemen, 41-year-old Francisco Javier Torronteras, the father of two daughters, was killed, too. That seemed to be that. Attention drifted back to the deteriorating situation in Iraq, next to which the Spanish events seemed to be only a sideshow.

But just before sunrise on Monday, April 19, something happened that raised the possibility that Madrid and Europe generally are center stage in the war on terror. Unknown intruders broke into the cemetery where the policeman Torronteras was interred. With a pick-axe, they pried open the crypt where his body lay, smashing the plaque on which memorial verses had been written by his family. They removed the coffin, wheeled it 500 meters away on a hand truck, opened it, chopped off the left hand, doused the corpse with gasoline, and lit it on fire.

As in the aftermath of March 11, the reaction of Spaniards to the event was as curious as the event itself. While right-wing talk radio--a thriving industry here--was full of callers raving against the moros (as Arabs are known among the working class), authorities and the press were standoffish. That the desecration of Torronteras's tomb had been carried out in homage to the corpse-burnings of American contract workers in Falluja just days before was a possibility that went unmentioned. Police said the attack on the grave could have been committed by "hooligans." The country's most balanced and interesting newspaper, Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, hedged its bets:

As for the possibility it was an act of vengeance carried out by radical Islamists, police sources said that Muslims usually have great respect for religious ceremony, and their rites seem not to embrace either amputation or the burning of remains. The act of burning the corpse and the coffin could also have been intended to destroy the evidence of whoever carried out the desecration.

El País, the Socialist party paper, read by the country's intellectual elite, speculated that skinheads could be involved. The paper wrote: "Mistreating a cadaver is a pagan practice, totally alien to the Koran, explains an expert in Islam." And in the photos they ran of Torronteras's funeral, all the papers took care to pixelate the faces of his pallbearers. Presumably to avoid their being targeted by "skinheads."

LESS THAN THREE DECADES after the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Spaniards are cautious about saying anything against the democratic process--or even against the results of a particular election. Most in the intellectual and political classes are reluctant to say that al Qaeda terrorism wrested a near-certain electoral victory from the party that al Qaeda hoped would lose, and handed power to the antiwar party that al Qaeda (at least according to its "strategy" document, which was intercepted on the Internet by Norwegian authorities) hoped would win. But this Spanish circumspection, admirable in many ways, has produced a chain reaction of self-interested self-deception: And from there it is only a short step to saying that Spain has no continuing problem with terrorism at all.