Madrid, Barcelona - Spanish police Thursday detained 18 people on charges of links with Islamist terrorism, including the 2004 Madrid train bombings, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.

Eight of the detainees were Moroccans, Rubalcaba said. Six are being held in the Barcelona area, one in Madrid and one in Algeciras on the southern coast.

Ten other people were also being questioned, Rubalcaba said, adding that some of them might be released.

Madrid - A judge at Spain's National Court on Thursday authorized the opening of a mass grave dating from the 1936-39 civil war and believed to contain the bones of poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Judge Baltasar Garzon accepted a request from 22 associations to investigate disappearances of leftist republican victims of the war, which was won by right-wing General Francisco Franco, and victims of Franco's subsequent dictatorship that lasted until 1975.

Madrid - An investigating judge has accused two aviation technicians and a maintenance chief of manslaughter in the Madrid air crash that killed 154 people on August 20, judicial sources said Thursday.

Judge Juan Javier Perez will question the three on suspicion of manslaughter on 154 counts and involuntarily causing injuries on 18 counts.

The judge also ordered the creation of a second investigating commission in addition to a civil aviation commission that has released a preliminary report on the accident.

The Spanair MD-82 jet that crashed immediately after take-off did not have its wing flaps and slats deployed, and the plane's warning system failed to inform the pilots of the problem, according to the preliminary report.

Barcelona - Spanish police detained at least four suspected Islamist extremists Thursday in the north-eastern region of Catalonia, police said.

Vienna - Ending over 400 years of all-male tradition, the Spanish Riding School in Vienna announced Wednesday it had accepted two women as apprentices to train with its famous white Lippizaner horses.

Now that they have passed a one-month trial period, 21-year-old Austrian Hannah Zeitlhofer and 17-year-old Sojourner Morrell from Britain will spend the next three to five years as students of the dressage troupe before they can advance to become "candidate riders."

Madrid - A judicial investigation into the August 20 air crash that killed 154 people in Madrid has begun hearing witnesses, Spanish judicial sources said Wednesday.

Judge Juan Javier Perez will hear witnesses, including a stewardess who saw the accident from another plane, and airport employees for several weeks.