Some 116 people have been named as suspects in the March 2004 attacks, in which bombs packed in sports bags exploded on four crowded commuter trains. Twenty-five people are already behind bars.

Del Olmo's report, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, will detail charges against the suspects.

The case is unprecedented in Spain in terms of bloodshed and complexity, and the trial could last 10 months because so many defendants and lawyers are involved, a lawyer said.

No venue for the trial has been named, but accommodation will be needed for hundreds of people including the accused, lawyers, court officials, police, journalists and members of public.

Before the case gets to trial it must pass through an initial preparatory period, but the High Court judge's report will be the main basis for the proceedings, legal experts say.

The March 11 bombs injured more than 2,000 people and traumatised Spain, already worn down by years of bombings and shootings by Basque guerrilla group ETA, which last month declared a permanent ceasefire.

Prosecutors say the 10 train bombs were activated by mobile phones that were traced to a shop in central Madrid, run by one of two main suspects.

Seven suspected bombers blew themselves up three weeks after the attack when police surrounded their apartment building in southern Madrid. Another fled Spain and died fighting in
Iraq.

While Madrid got back to its feet quickly after the bombings, politicians have continued to trade accusations about who knew what and when, and how that information was used.

The blasts hit Madrid just three days before a general election that unexpectedly removed the right-wing party of Jose Maria Aznar, a close ally of U.S. President
George Bush.

Aznar's Popular Party (PP) had taken a hard line against ETA during its administration and quickly painted the Basque separatists as the main suspects for the attacks, despite evidence pointing to Al Qaeda-linked cells and therefore a possible link to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which Aznar had backed.

When Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took over as prime minister he recalled Spanish troops from Iraq as he had promised to do in his election campaign.

Documents declassified last year showed that four months before the bombs, the National Intelligence Center sent a report to the Interior Ministry warning of a possible Islamist attack.

"The necessary conditions of confidence and calm are not there, either among young people, or companies, to allow the application of the First Job Contract," Villepin said after meetings with Chirac.

President Jacques Chirac announced earlier Monday that the highly controversial Article 8 of the equal opportunities law would be replaced with measures to help disadvantaged young people find work.

Villepin said the contract would be replaced by proposals aimed at helping disadvantaged young job-seekers and he said he would open a discussion "without preconditions" with social partners on how to provide for youth unemployment.

A poll by the French left-wing Liberation newspaper showed that Villepin's popularity, which stood at 49 percent early January, had fallen to 25 percent this weekend.

French trade unions and the government opposition hailed the decision as a success for the social movement. Trade unions and student groups, which had threatened more protests unless the measure was withdrawn, were to meet later Monday to decide on their next action.

The CPE law allowed employers to fire, without cause, newly hired workers under the age of 26 within two years.

Opponents said the law would erode hard-won labour rights and make it more difficult for youths to find long-term jobs, and also criticized the maneuver as "surrealistic" and "undemocratic."

The proposed law provoked massive protests, at times violent, in which more than 3,600 people were arrested.

Details of the amended measures were expected later in the day and new legislation could be presented to parliament as early as this week.

Smiling out from the cover of four French magazines this week, interviewed on the main evening news, the elegant 52-year-old is suddenly everywhere and the so-called 'Ségolène factor' an established feature of the political scene.

"Is she ready?" asked the VSD weekly, while Paris Match, under the headline 'Segolene awaits her hour', devoted an eight-page spread to her "march" to become France's first woman president.

Royal, the president of the western Poitou-Charentes region and the partner of Socialist Party leader François Hollande, has all but eclipsed her left-wing rivals in the popularity ratings since the start of this year.

Polls suggests she is the only candidate on the left capable of challenging the centre-right favourite in next year's election, ruling UMP party chief and interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

For her supporters, the former minister and mother of four children brings the promise of renewal, as a fresh face on a political scene dominated by grey-haired men and seen as increasingly cut off from voters.

Unlike other Socialist figures, Royal has not been seen locking arms with protestors during the upheaval over the government's First Employment Contract (CPE), which makes it easier to fire under 26-year-olds.

But she took a controversial public stance against the contract - saying her region would hold back grants from companies that used the measure, which she says gives off the wrong "signal" to France's youth.

"It strengthens the idea of France's decline," she argued in Paris Match, "to tell the younger generation: 'You can be sacked easily just because you are young'."

Though in many ways a traditional Socialist, Royal has stirred passions by speaking of her admiration for Tony Blair, and dismissed as "ideologically simplistic" the contempt in which he is held by much of the French left.

"There are good things to take from all sides, from all European countries which have the same problems as us and which are trying to drive down unemployment," she told Paris Match.

"The French are waiting for something that their politicians are unable to provide," she said.

But she is careful to reject the notion of labour 'flexibility' - reviled by many in France - speaking of 'agility' instead, and points to Denmark as a successful example of a fluid job market combined with strong social protection.

With Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin badly weakened by the job reform crisis, many commentators are predicting a Sarkozy-Royal run-off in next year's election.

"I will be ready if the time comes," Royal told Paris Match.

Short of a manifesto, she has set up a website called 'Desires for the Future', with a political discussion forum whose contents will be published in book form in the autumn.

But even with the polls on her side, Royal faces a major challenge to bring round the powers-that-be inside her own camp, with an internal vote to select a candidate due in November or December.

Jockeying for position with party heavyweights including former ministers Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Laurent Fabius and Jacques Lang - Royal has faced months of sniping from the party ranks.

Initially the target of misogynist remarks, her rivals continue to criticise her for having no structured project, and some accuse her of exploiting the party machinery to further her ambitions.

"Some liken her to Uma Thurman in 'Kill Bill', cutting up her opponents with a media sabre. Others see her as a kind of Mother Theresa who attracts irrational devotion," wrote the Nouvel Observateur.

Party members "will not choose the cover of Paris Match", Socialist deputy Jean Glavany snapped this week, warning that the PS candidate would be chosen based on "content" and "ideas".

For political scientist Dominique Reynie, Royal "embodies a need for renewal on the left. She is not a flash in the pan, but mind you her real test is only just beginning."

The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers say an Einsatzgruppe was all set to go to Palestine and begin killing the roughly half a million Jews that had fled Europe to escape Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.

In the study, published last month, they say "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps" led by the famed desert commander General Erwin Rommel.

The Middle East death squad, similar to those operating throughout eastern Europe during the war, was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Walther Rauff, the historians say.

"The central plan for the group was the realization of the Holocaust in Palestine," the authors wrote in their study that appears in a book entitled "Germans, Jews, Genocide: The Holocaust as History and the Present."

But since Germany never conquered British-controlled Palestine, plans for bringing the Holocaust to what is now
Israel and the Palestinian territories never came to fruition.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in Europe. According to their own records, the Einsatzgruppen killed over one million people, most of them civilians.

In the battle of El Alamein, Egypt, British General Bernard Montgomery turned the tide of the war in north Africa by routing Rommel's "Afrika Korps" and ending his African campaign.

As they did in eastern Europe, the plan was for the 24 members involved in the death squad to enlist Palestinian collaborators so that the "mass murder would continue under German leadership without interruption."

Fortunately for the Jews in Palestine, "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" never made it out of Greece.

"The history of the Middle East would have been completely different and a Jewish state could never have been established if the Germans and Arabs had joined forces," the historians conclude.

Regarding the question why this is emerging 61 years after the end of World War Two, Mallmann and Cueppers said they simply unearthed something other historians had not found yet.

"We have recovered 35 bodies so far," the spokesman, Govind Singh, said.

Reports say several hundred people are trapped inside a huge tent at the fair. The injured, many of them seriously hurt, are being taken to hospitals.

Plastic roofs

Local journalists say there were more than 2,000 people at the consumer electronics fair in Meerut, about 80km (50 miles) north-east of the capital, when the fire broke out around 1800 Indian time (1230 GMT).

The fair was being held in three long, air-conditioned tents with just one exit each, and plastic roofs supported by iron rods.

TV footage showed smoke billowing out of the tent and flames spiralling into the air as a large number of charred bodies and seriously injured people were carried from the blaze.

"Dead bodies are strewn around, most of them are charred beyond recognition. The bodies were dumped into truck, jeeps and ambulances and taken away from public glare," Prakash Arya, an eyewitness, told the Associated Press news agency.

A BBC correspondent says hundreds of people have rushed to the spot to search for their relatives and friends who went to the fair.

Paramilitary forces have also been deployed.