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Madrid: Ten of the 21 men convicted in the Madrid train bombings have begun a hunger strike to protest what they consider to be excessive jail terms, the government said yesterday.
An official with the Spanish Penitentiary System said the 10 included two Moroccans - Jamal Zougam and Othman Gnaoui - who were convicted of murder and attempted murder and each sentenced to nearly 43,000 years in prison. Under Spanish law the most time they can serve is 40 years.
The March 11, 2004 terror attacks on the Madrid commuter rail system killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,850.
Verdicts and sentences in Europe's worst Islamist terrorist attack were handed down on Wednesday. Altogether, 21 of 28 people on trial were convicted of crimes ranging from weapons trafficking to belonging to a terrorist organisation and murder.
The 10 hunger-strikers notified prison authorities in Madrid and Alicante in writing that they have stopped eating, although they still take liquids, the official said.
Rather than insist that they were innocent, as they did during the trial, the convicts said in the written notices that their prison sentences were too long, the official said pleading anonymity because department rules barred her from giving her name.
Zougam was convicted of placing at least one bomb on a train, and Gnaoui of being a key figure in the plot who served as right hand man to its operational chief. The latter, Jamal Ahmidan, killed himself along with six other suspected ringleaders to avoid arrest three weeks after the bombings.
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