Van attack leaves 13 dead
Van driven into Barcelona crowd; 100 injured as well
BARCELONA, Spain — A van veered onto a sidewalk and barrelled down a busy pedestrian zone Thursday in Barcelona’s picturesque Las Ramblas district, swerving from side to side as it mowed down tourists and residents and turned the popular European vacation promenade into a bloody killing zone. Thirteen people were killed and 100 were injured, 15 of them seriously, in what authorities called a terror attack.
Victims were left sprawled in the street, spattered with blood or crippled by broken limbs. Others fled in panic, screaming or carrying young children in their arms.
“It was clearly a terror attack, intended to kill as many people as possible,” Josep Lluis Trapero, senior police official, told a news conference late Thursday.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, saying in a statement on its Aamaq news agency that the attack was carried out by “soldiers of the Islamic State” in response to the extremist group’s calls for followers to target countries participating in the coalition trying to drive it from Syria and Iraq.
Authorities said a Belgian was among the dead and a Greek woman was among the injured. Germany’s Foreign Ministry said it was checking reports that Germans were among the victims.
After the afternoon attack, Las Ramblas went into lockdown. Swarms of police brandishing handguns and automatic weapons launched a manhunt in the downtown district, ordering stores and cafes and public transport to shut down.
Several hours later, authorities reported two arrests, one a Spanish national from Melilla, a Spanish-run Mediterranean seafront enclave in North Africa, and the other a Moroccan.
But Trapero said neither of them was the van’s driver. The arrests took place in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll and in Alcanar, the site of a gas explosion at a house on Wednesday night. Police said they were investigating a possible link to Thursday’s attack.
Barcelona is the latest European city to experience a terror attack using a vehicle as a weapon to target a popular tourist destination, after similar attacks in France and Britain.
Thursday’s bloodshed was the country’s deadliest attack since 2004, when al-Qaida-inspired bombers killed 192 people in co-ordinated assaults on Madrid’s commuter trains. In the years since, Spanish authorities have arrested nearly 200 jihadists, but the only deadly attacks were bombings claimed by the Basque separatist group ETA that killed five people over the past decade.
Hours after Thursday’s attack, the police force for Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region said that troopers searching for the perpetrators shot and killed a man who was in a car that hit two officers at a traffic blockade on the outskirts of Barcelona. But Trapero said it was not linked to the van attack.
Las Ramblas is a wide avenue of stalls and shops that cuts through the centre of Barcelona and is one of the city’s top tourist destinations.