Shock in hometown of Spain terror suspects
Spanish police say brothers at centre of Barcelona attack, as families denounce bloodshed
RIPOLL, SPAIN— They were brothers and boyhood friends from a town with no unfamiliar faces. They were linked by Moroccan roots and equally tied by their upbringings in Ripoll, an ancient hub in the Catalan foothills known for its monastery and passageways dotted with cafés and kebab shops.
But most recently, police believe, the young men were drawn together by an imam and an alleged plot to murder on a massive scale — an extraordinary secret for 12 people to keep for months on end.
In the suspected extremist cell’s final days, the group accumulated more than 100 gas canisters, blew up a house in a botched effort to make bombs, drove a van through Barcelona’s storied Las Ramblas promenade, and attacked beachside tourists, Spanish authorities said.
Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 14 people, including a Vancouver man, and left scores wounded. Five of the dozen were shot dead by police.
Now, Ripoll is cut off by police roadblocks as the search for an alleged cell member thought to still be on the run continues. Families and friends in the town are torn between horror at the bloodshed and grief for the children they thought they knew.
“We don’t know whether to cry and mourn them or what to do,” said Wafa Marsi, who knew the attackers and stood with their weeping mothers on Saturday as they clustered in small groups in the town square. “They have killed 13 or 14 people and wounded a hundred, and we don’t know what to do.”
What the families did, after fiercely debating the issue, was denounce the attack, some holding up homemade signs reading “Not in our name.”
Police have identified 12 members of the cell, but three remained unaccounted for Sunday. Two are be- lieved to have died when the house where the plot was hatched exploded Wednesday, Catalan police official Josep Lluis Trapero said Sunday.
Complicating the manhunt for the suspected fugitive and any other possible accomplices, though, was the fact that police so far have been unable to pinpoint who remained at large. The explosion in Alcanar, 300 kilometres south of Ripoll, nearly obliterated the bomb makers along with the house. A police official has said the imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, is thought to be one of them.
Trapero declined to confirm that Younes Abouyaaquoub, a 22-yearold Moroccan, was the one at large and the suspected driver of the van that plowed down the Las Ramblas promenade Thursday, killing 13 people and injuring 120. Another attack hours later killed one person and injured others in Cambrils, a seaside town south of the city.
“We are working in that line,” Trapero said. But he added: “We don’t know where he is.”
Another police official did confirm that three vans tied to the investigation were rented with Abouyaaquoub’s credit card: the one used in the Las Ramblas carnage, another found in Ripoll, where all the main attack suspects lived, and a third found in Vic, on the road between the two.
Police believe the cell members had planned to fill the vans with explosives and create a massive attack in the Catalan capital. Trapero con- firmed that more than 100 tanks of butane gas were found at the Alcanar house that exploded, as well as ingredients of the explosive TATP, which was used by Daesh in other attacks.
“Our thesis is that the group had planned one or more attacks with explosives in the city of Barcelona,” he said. The plot was foiled when the house in Alcanar blew up Wednesday night.
None of the 12 had any known history of violent extremism, Spanish police have said.
Trapero confirmed the imam was part of the investigation, but said police had no solid evidence that he was responsible for radicalizing the young men in the cell. Es Satty in June quit working at a mosque in Ripoll and has not been seen since.
One woman who heard Es Satty’s sermons said the imam repeatedly preached about jihad and killing infidels. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing that she would be attacked for speaking out.
“I feel like I could have done something. I feel a little bit guilty now,” she said. “Everybody knew it. It was an open secret.”
Vancouver police confirmed on Sunday that 53-year-old Canadian Ian Moore Wilson was among those killed in Barcelona and his wife, Valerie, was wounded.
The Catalan regional government said 51attack victims were still hospitalized Sunday, 10 of them in critical condition.