SPANISH OFFICIAL: DRUGS FUNDED TRAIN BOMBERS

Madrid, Spain - The perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings were members of an autonomous cell who may have had ties with fundamentalists elsewhere but received their financing chiefly from drug profits, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said yesterday.

Officials are investigating the possibility that someone with a deeper grounding in radical Islam - and perhaps terrorist training in Afghanistan or elsewhere - was the overall leader of the March 11 attacks that killed 191 people, but are not sure such a person even exists, Acebes said.

Spain has received a letter and a video from an al-Qaeda-linked group claiming responsibility for the Madrid attacks that warned of more violence unless Sp[anish troops were withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Officials believe that the group was largely confined to Spain and that most of its members are either in custody or dead.

The on-the-ground coordinator of the attacks is believed to have been Serhane Ben Abdel-majid Fakhet, 35, a Tunisian real estate agent who blew himself up with six other suspects April 3 as police moved in to arrest them, Acebes told a news conference.

Acebes said the cell that staged the March 11 attacks "was local and autonomous, but its leaders have connections with other fundamentalist groups." He said investigators were pursuing leads in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Tunisia and Morocco.

The group's funding came chiefly from drug sales, Acebes said.  The bombers apparently obtained the dynamite from petty criminals in a coal-mining region of northern Spain who accepted drugs as payment, he said.

The bombers also used proceeds from drug sales to rent an apartment, buy a car, and purchase cell phones used as detonators in the bombs, Acebes said.  He gave no figure on how much money that bombers had raised through the drug sales.

Acebes said the core of the bombers' cell had been neutralized through a wave of arrests and the deaths of the suspects who committed suicide.  He declined to rule out future attacks by cell members till at large.