Al-Qaida may be morphing into more dangerous foe

WASHINGTON — The deadly commuter train bombings in Madrid last week are an ominous signal that al-Qaida and its allied terror groups are adapting new techniques for carrying out attacks and could threaten Europe and the United States, European and U.S. officials said Monday.

As Spanish authorities revealed more evidence suggesting that radical Muslims were responsible for the attacks that killed 201 people and wounded 1,500, several top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials said they were not ready to definitively link the attacks to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

But the officials said the attacks likely were the work of what CIA Director George Tenet has described as the new face of al-Qaida: a loose network of groups — some tied to bin Laden's organization, others that merely sympathize with al-Qaida's anti-American message — scattered around the world. Because many of the groups are not closely tied to what remains of al-Qaida's top leaders, the groups are difficult to detect, intelligence analysts say.

Officials across Europe and in Washington are weighing the possibility that radical Muslim groups, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the Madrid bombings, will be inspired by the notion that the pre-election attacks swayed Spanish voters to elect a new government that will not support the Bush administration's policies in Iraq.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the bombings raise the possibility of attacks timed to disrupt or influence the outcome of elections in other countries, including the U.S.

presidential election. Meanwhile, U.S. and European officials scrambled to devise ways to improve rail security, a particularly daunting task in rail-dependent Europe.

Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for Homeland Security, said on NBC's "Today" show that much can be done to improve security in the U.S. rail system but that "we have to recognize that it has been historically an open system, very difficult to add layers of security."

The United States' improved security since 9/11, along with its relative isolation from the bases of al-Qaida and other radical Muslim groups, generally are believed to make it more difficult to attack than Europe, Indonesia and Africa, which have been other targets for al-Qaida in recent years.