Other+terror+attacks+on+major+cities+including+London,+Bali+and+Madrid


 * Terrorist Attacks in Spain**

On Thursday,March 11 2004, during the morning traffic of people going to work in Madrid,several bombs were exploded in commuter trains as they pulled into stations.These terrorist attacks were highly coordinated, with the first at 07:39, localtime, followed closely by three more nearby. A few minutes later at 07:45 and07:55, two more. About 200 people were killed and some 1500 were injured. At10:10 two more bombs were found by police and detonated by bomb squads.Examination of the un-detonated bombs revealed that they were designed toexplode when a mobile phone in the package was called. I wastraveling in Brazil, but the local papers had detailed reports on the attacks.I was able to establish the parameters of the formal prediction for lateranalysis. Two other people, Per Lassen and Dick Bierman, also suggested theMadrid bombings and the anti-terrorist demonstrations the next day (12 March)should be examined; they are included as predictors in the results table. Followingprecedents from other terrorist attacks, I set the period from 07:00 to 12:00as the formal prediction (6 to 11 GMT), to include some time before the firstexplosion and several hours of the aftermath. The trend over this period isextreme -- but it is a negative slope, opposite to the standard prediction. TheChisquare is 17634 on 18000 df, with corresponding p-value of 0.974. The firstof the two following figures shows the formal analysis. Anexploratory examination of the context is shown in the second figure, whichplots the data for the whole GMT day. It is apparent that the random walkchanged at about the time of the terrorist attacks, and continued in anextremely unlikely negative trend for about 10 hours. While it is notappropriate to calculate probabilities for this selected segment, it is in theextreme tail of the distribution of such analyses performed for all days in the5.5 year database. The

by Connor Eacott and Oliver J (The Brunts School)