Main suspect in van attack shot dead

Man wearing bomb belt said to be driver

SUBIRATS, SPAIN •Aman thought to be the driver in the Barcelona van attack was shot dead by Spanish police Monday after authorities announced he also was suspected of killing the owner of a hijacked getaway car. The fugitive was wearing a bomb belt, authorities said.

Younes Abouyaaqoub was shot when officers confronted him in Subirats, a rural area known for its vineyards about 45 kilometres west of Barcelona, police in Spain’s Catalonia region said. A bomb disposal robot was dispatched to approach him, police said.

Abouyaaqoub, 22, had been the target of an international manhunt that had raised fears throughout the region since Thursday’s van attack in Barcelona.

Authorities said Monday they now have evidence that Abouyaaqoub drove the van that plowed down the city’s Las Ramblas promenade, killing 13 pedestrians and injuring more than 120 others.

They said Abouyaaqoub, who was born in Morocco and has Spanish residency, also is suspected of carjacking a man and stabbing him to death as he made his getaway, raising the death toll between the Barcelona attack and a related attack hours later to 15.

Another vehicle attack early Friday by other members of what Catalonia regional police have described as a 12-member extremist cell killed one person and wounded several others in the coastal town of Cambrils. That ended in a shootout with police, who killed five attackers.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group has claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Roser Ventura, whose father owns a vineyard between the towns of Sadurni d’Anoia and Subirats, said he alerted the regional Catalan police when they spotted a car crossing their property at high speed.

Earlier Monday, regional police chief Josep Lluis Trapero said investigators have “scientific evidence” showing Abouyaaqoub drove the speeding van in Las Ramblas and killed the owner of a hijacked sedan on Thursday night.

He said the suspect walked through Barcelona for about 90 minutes after the van attack — through the famed La Boqueria market and nearly to Barcelona University — before hijacking the car.

Perez was parking his car, a Ford Focus, in a lot between 6:10 p.m. and 6:20 p.m. Abouyaaqoub stabbed him before 6:32 p.m., put him in the car’s rear seats and drove away, Trapero said.

Trapero said Perez was already dead when Abouyaaqoub then rammed the car through a police checkpoint minutes later and police opened fire on his car.

The suspect ran over a police officer as the car evaded the checkpoint. About 7 p.m., police found the car and Perez’s body.

Regional authorities said Monday 48 people were still hospitalized from both attacks, eight of them in critical condition.