A Spanish court today convicted 21 people of involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but unexpectedly acquitted the man accused by prosecutors of having masterminded Europe's worst Islamist terror attacks.

A total of 191 people died when ten bombs packed into sports bags ripped through four commuter trains on the morning of March 11, 2004. More than 1,800 commuters were injured in an atrocity which traumatised the nation and saw Spain's conservative government dumped from office in a general election only a few days later.

Chief Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez today pronounced two Moroccans - Jamal Zougam and Othman el-Gnaoui - and the Spanish miner who supplied the dynamite, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, guilty of murdering the 191 people killed in the blasts. They were sentenced to almost 40,000 years in prison each, although under Spanish law the maximum they can spend behind bars is 40 years.

But the man accused of organising the attacks, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, also known as "Mohammed the Egyptian", was acquitted on all charges along with six other defendants. Ahmed followed the reading of the verdicts on a live videolink from a prison in Italy where he is serving a sentence for belonging to an international terrorist organisation and was said by his lawyer to have burst into tears at news of his acquittal.

Two other alleged ringleaders received sentences of less than 20 years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organisation. A total of 28 defendants were on trial, seven of whom were acquitted.

Zougam was one of the first suspects to be arrested. Police were able to trace the Sim-card of a mobile phone that was attached to one of the train bombs that did not explode to a shop run by the Moroccan. Trashorras and el-Gnaoui were respectively condemned for supplying and transporting the explosives.

Judge Gomez Bermudez and his two colleagues had been considering their verdicts since a four-month trial ended in July and he began today's proceedings by reading out a summary - itself lasting around an hour - of the 700-page judgment.

Dozens of armed police wearing bullet-proof vests surrounded the court, located at the entrance to a park in the west of the capital, as a helicopter hovered overhead. An armoured car with a machine gun was also parked outside the building.

All 28 defendants - 19 Arabs, mostly Moroccans, living in Spain, and nine Spaniards charged with providing the explosives - had pleaded not guilty. The defendants also denied having any link to radical Islam or Al-Qaeda, and several went on a temporary hunger strike during the high-security trial to protest what they said was the"injustice" of their situation.

But several of the defendants were contradicted by witnesses who said they saw them leaving rucksacks on the trains on the day of the bombings or by the discovery of traces of their DNA at key sites of the attacks.

Most of the accused said they knew some of the seven suspected masterminds of the attacks who blew themselves up at a suburban Madrid apartment three weeks after the bombings as police closed in, including the presumed leader of the terror cell.

In his summary, the judge announced compensation awards ranging from 30,000 to 1.5 million euros for victims of the bombings.

He also pointedly ruled out the participation of the Basque guerrilla group ETA, which was initially accused of involvement by Spain's then government, which was voted out of office three days after the attacks after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.

Thomas Catan, Times correspondent in Madrid, said that many survivors of the attacks appeared surprised and upset today by the number of acquittals and by some of the sentences imposed, which were shorter than prosecutors had demanded.

But Jose Luis Zapatero, the Socialist Prime Minister who came to power after the Madrid bombings, insisted that justice had been served.

"Today justice was done and we must now look to the future, strengthening coexistence," Mr Zapatero said. "The barbaric acts committed on March 11 left a deep pain, which stays with us as a homage to the victims."

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