Marlaska invites the Madrid Community and City Council to join the Memorial Center for the Victims of Terrorism

Given the possibility that they accept, Interior warns that the board of the center "always" has taken its agreements unanimously

MADRID, 20 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has invited this Monday the Community of Madrid and the City Council of the capital to join the board of trustees of the Foundation Center for the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism (FCMVT). If it materializes, both institutions would join the management of the headquarters of this memorial.

This has been communicated by the Interior through an informative note, in which it details that Marlaska has transferred this proposal in a meeting that he has held this morning at the Ministry with the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Interior of the Community of Madrid, Enrique López, and the mayor of the city, José Luis Martínez-Almeida. In addition, the Government delegate in Madrid, Mercedes González, attended.

The Deputy Minister for Justice and Victims, Yolanda Ibarrola, and the director of the Fundación Centro Memorial de las Víctimas del Terrorism, Florencio Domínguez, also participated in the meeting.

Interior has indicated that with the incorporation of the Community and the City Council to the board of trustees of the FCMVT, "the administrations involved want to join forces and strengthen coordination for the implementation of the Madrid headquarters of the Memorial Center".

"The intention is to reproduce the scheme applied for the creation and start-up of the one in Vitoria-Gasteiz, inaugurated on June 1, 2021 by the King and Queen, and whose board of trustees incorporated both the Basque Government and the City Council of the Álava capital", has explained.

If both Madrid institutions end up accepting the invitation, the FCMVT will have to modify its statutes to expand and include the Community and the City Council in its board of trustees, which at the moment is made up of 21 trustees. As Interior has stressed, the board of trustees "always" has adopted its agreements by unanimous consensus to date.

At today's meeting, the Interior and the Madrid representatives have agreed to create a technical commission to determine the legal integration of the Community and the Consistory in the board of trustees and to promote the start-up of the new headquarters in Madrid.

Interior has indicated that the headquarters in Madrid of the Memorial Center for the Victims of Terrorism will be located in the Duque de Medinaceli Building, in the central neighborhood of Las Cortes. There it will have 4,000 square meters, a space larger than that of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

At the Madrid headquarters it will be possible to install a permanent exhibition that will include a space for reflection, memory and offering; rooms for the different temporary exhibitions that are programmed; administrative dependencies that manage the future activity of the headquarters; a library, and an area dedicated to research and dissemination of matters of interest to victims of terrorist violence.

The exhibition will be dedicated to all the victims of all forms of terrorism, although it will reserve a special space for the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, the "most lethal" --he emphasizes-- of this type committed in Europe, which caused 193 dead and nearly 2,000 wounded.

The Ministry run by Marlaska has pointed out that the design will conform to the same criteria used at the center's headquarters in Euskadi, which pays "special attention" to ETA violence, but has distributed its spaces between different forms of terrorism "so as not to leave without the deserved memory and tribute to any of his victims".

And he stressed that the creation of the Madrid headquarters is a "demand from the associations of victims of terrorism" and a "commitment" from the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who promised to provide the Memorial Center with a second headquarters in Madrid in a board meeting held in December 2021.

The Community of Madrid has a total of 412 fatalities from terrorism, which makes it the second Spanish country with the highest number of murdered people, only surpassed by the Basque Country.

Of the total number of victims by terrorist groups, 210 died in jihadist attacks, while the victims of ETA are 123; 49 of GRAPO, FRAP and other acronyms of the extreme left; 21 from extreme right groups, and 9 were killed by foreign groups without a stable presence in Spanish territory.