Menace in Madrid

Tension ensued when the police ordered the restaurant closest to the embassy to close its doors, because a bomb could have been placed in a nearby car.

The US Embassy in Madrid, located on Serrano Street in the busy Salamanca district, has upgraded its protection in recent months, due to the perceived danger of a terrorist attack. Madrid residents are used to lounging at their favorite Diego de León terraces, sipping wine or beer with two gigantic tanks looming on the sidewalk in front of the well-known American premises.

Last Friday around 1am, when all the surrounding bars and cafeterias were full of neighbors just back from their summer holidays, several police cars closed off a large stretch of Diego de León, while agents tagged with tape dozens of vehicles.

Tension ensued when the police ordered the restaurant closest to the embassy to close its doors, because a bomb could have been placed in a nearby car. By then customers, neighbors and parking valets had quickly withdrawn most of the vehicles located in the area and the suspects had been isolated: a red hardtop located about 50 meters from the entrance of the embassy ??and a grey sedan parked a little further up. Finally, at 3am, the operation was called off.

These impasses are becoming increasingly common in European cities, where fear of a terrorist attack is fuelled almost daily by television and online media. An undeclared war between the Western world and the Islamic nations was outlined by American historian Samuel Huntington in his now famous article “Clash of Civilizations”, published more than twenty years ago. Since then his conviction that people’s cultural and religious identities would be the primary cause of hostility in the post-Cold-War world has proved to be frightfully accurate.

The Madrid incident will repeat itself not only in the capital of Spain, but in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and all the main European cities. Hopefully, it’ll be more false alarms.