A book of the Koran was discovered last Monday, November 21, at the official reception with which the local authorities presented the King and Queen of Spain at the Castillo de San José, on the occasion of their last visit to the Canary Islands. The information is advanced this Friday exclusively by LA VOZ in its free paper edition.
According to witnesses who prove their presence at the surprising and unexpected moment of the discovery, while Don Juan Carlos I and Doña Sofía were inside the Castle, specifically visiting the International Museum of Contemporary Art (MIAC) inside, some curious people, a few national police officers and some local agents were able to notice the annoying presence of a rough cover under one of the guests' cars, an area previously searched by police dogs.
From inside this dark lining came nothing less than one of those texts with which Muslims transmit to each other the sacred teachings of Islam.
Are there reasons to worry or is this all just a bad joke by some unscrupulous person who, intentionally and only to cause alarm, left the manual abandoned in such a compromising place?
On this occasion and as a novelty, the copy of the Koran in question had several central pages torn out.
According to experts, fundamentalists do not have the habit nor do they consider themselves with sufficient authority to tear pages from the Koran, unless, of course, these could contain interesting annotations or instructions written in Arabic that could compromise them.
The representatives of the Muslim community based in Lanzarote themselves assure, actively and passively, that it is not so easy to get hold of one of these manuals if one does not believe or is not sufficiently linked to Islam, although it is also true that the book could simply have been stolen.
According to the first indications, the situation during the visit of the King and Queen would have been intentionally provoked by someone not linked to terrorist circles, and who would simply have tried to emulate the situation that occurred in Madrid, when the Police found a tape with verses from the Koran in a van on the same afternoon of the attacks of March 11, 2004.
In Madrid, in addition to the indiscriminate nature of the massacre and the absence of warning, it was the tape with Koranic verses that served to rule out the terrorist group ETA as the perpetrator.
After both the text and the book itself have logically been promptly analyzed in facilities outside the Island, no authorized authority has spoken about it at the moment, but it cannot be ruled out that this fact, which has come to light almost two weeks after the last visit of the King and Queen to the Islands, may be related to the possible presence of Islamic terrorists in Lanzarote, where four Moroccans accused of being members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) were already arrested in December 2004.
Monitored meetings
It is said from high spheres that on the same island where this book has been found, compromised meetings could apparently be taking place between sympathizers, leaders or former leaders who in their past would have belonged to armed terrorist groups. They also say that each of their movements is being controlled. According to the investigations that Judge Garzón had been carrying out since 1995, specialized publications placed Spain in second place in the threat ranking before 11-M, a place now occupied by Denmark. Why these meetings on the Island? What role does Lanzarote play in this new scale of terror?
