Spain kept the terrorist alert unchanged at the second-highest level after police broke up the group that carried out two attacks this week that killed 14 civilians and injured scores of others.
Other developments:
- An official in Spain confirms on Catalunya Radio that 22-year-old Moroccan Younes Abouyaaquoub is the attacker at large; and
- Spanish police are continuing the search for Abouyaaquoub, who they consider to be the final member of a cell that carried out vehicle attacks in Barcelona and a nearby town that killed 14 and injured more than 120 others.
The police are searching on Monday throughout the northeastern region bordering France. They later identified that he is Abouyaaquoub. He is suspected of driving the van that plowed down the Las Ramblas promenade last Thursday. Another attack hours later killed one person and injured others in Cambrils, a seaside town south of the city. Police say the cell consisted of 12 men, all with connections to the northern town of Ripoll.
Government experts found no “imminent terrorism attack threat” and recommended maintaining the alert at level 4, the second-highest in the five-step scale, Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said last Saturday at a news conference.
Police broke up the gang that staged the attacks in the Catalan cities of Barcelona and Cambrils, Zoido said after a meeting of the terrorism threat-assessment group.
The police will reinforce its presence in certain key parts of the country, including crowded areas and popular tourist spots, he said. Spain has been at level 4 since mid-2015, following attacks in France.
The terrorists had planned a devastating assault with explosives and may have rammed pedestrians with vehicles after their initial plan failed, Catalan police chief Josep Lluis Trapero said last Friday.
Five suspected terrorists were killed by cops, and four have been arrested. A large explosion in the early hours of Thursday brought down a building in the town of Alcanar, about 200 kilometers from Barcelona, where the police think a group of terrorists had been plotting an attack for some time, Trapero told reporters. Deprived of bomb-making material, they then carried out the twin strikes “in a more rudimentary way.”
“The explosion in Alcanar stopped larger attacks from happening because they no longer had some of the material they needed,” Trapero said.
Ties to imam linked to ISIS
Until Thursday, just hours before the Barcelona attack, many of the young men seemed to be living completely normal lives. One had slept late, his mother said. Another had worked as a waiter serving wine in a mountaintop restaurant days before.
By Friday morning, seven were dead, an eighth was critically wounded and one was on the run. Three others were detained by police. They had grown up together, and among them were four sets of brothers. Most of them were not even 25.
All 12 are now suspected by investigators of having played a part in the attacks that killed 14 and wounded more than 80. Most of the victims died after being run over on Las Ramblas, the main pedestrian boulevard in Barcelona.
“These guys were normal, they said ‘hello, goodbye,’ they all worked, they had cars, they had parents,” said Habiba al Loquiat, a resident of Ripoll, the small town where many of them lived and where Loquiat attended a gathering last Saturday of Moroccans in solidarity with the victims.
There is much that investigators have yet to learn, but based on interviews with the men’s friends, neighbors, religious figures and police, the answer appears to lie at least in part with a shadowy figure linked to the Islamic State, Abdelbaki Essati, who is believed to have been killed last Wednesday, a day before the attack, when explosives that the group was manufacturing accidentally detonated.
Essati, who was in his 40s and who is reported to have had links to Islamic extremists going back at least a decade, somehow brought the young men under his influence after establishing himself as an imam in their mountain town of Ripoll, even though few of the young men had a history of regularly attending mosque.
Investigators and terrorism experts believe that the planning for the plot may have begun not long after Essati’s arrival a year ago at the second of two mosques where he worked in Ripoll. They now say that at least some of the suspected participants traveled abroad before the attack, either to Morocco or elsewhere in Europe, as did Essati.
Image credits: AP/Santi Palacios