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 Four lead defendants were found guilty of murder and other charges, each handed sentences that stretched into the thousands of years in the attacks on four packed commuter trains heading into Madrid from working-class neighborhoods during the morning rush hour of March 11.
Twenty-eight people were charged in the day of carnage, which was etched in Spain's collective memory and became known simply as 11-M, much like the term 9-11 in the U.S.
Fourteen other people were found guilty of lesser charges such as belonging to a terrorist group. Seven other lesser suspects were acquitted on all charges.
Alleged mastermind Rabei Osman, a 35-year-old Egyptian, was accused of bragging during a wiretapped phone conversation that the attacks, which killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800, were his idea.
Osman was in jail in Italy on other terrorism charges and planned to watch Wednesday's session via video conference.
Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez read out the verdicts in a hushed courtroom, with gun-toting police and bomb-sniffing dogs on guard outside.
Most of the suspects are young Muslim men of North African origin accused of acting out of allegiance to al-Qaida to avenge the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, although Spanish investigators say they did so without a direct order or financing from Osama bin Laden's terror network.
The defendants -- whose five-month trial ended in July -- also include nine Spaniards, including one woman charged with supplying stolen dynamite used in the string of rapid-fire explosions. All 28 insisted they were innocent.
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 Prosecutors were seeking sentences of up to 38,976 years each for the eight lead defendants
-- 30 years for each of the people killed in the attacks, 18 years for each of the wounded, plus more time for other terrorism-related charges. But the most time any can spend in jail is 40 years. Spain has no death penalty or life imprisonment.
Seven suspected ringleaders of the attacks -- including the operational chief and an ideologue
-- blew themselves up in a safe house outside Madrid three weeks after the massacre as special forces who tracked them via cell phone traffic moved in to arrest them.
Conservatives in power at the time of the attacks initially blamed Basque separatists, even as evidence of Islamic involvement emerged. This led to charges of a cover-up to deflect attention away from the government's support of the Iraq war, and in elections three days after the bombings the conservatives lost to the opposition Socialists.
[Associated Press; By DANIEL WOOLLS]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
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