Second attack foiled in Spain WOMAN ESCAPES TERROR ATTACKS IN 3 COUNTRIES

5 suspects wearing ‘fake bomb belts’ shot dead by Spanish police

BARCELONA: Police on Friday shot and killed five people wearing fake bomb belts who staged a car attack in a seaside resort in Spain’s Catalonia region hours after a van plowed into pedestrians on a busy Barcelona promenade, killing at least 14 people and injuring over 100 others.

Authorities said the back-toback vehicle attacks — as well as an explosion earlier this week elsewhere in Catalonia— were connected and the work of a large terrorist group. Three people were arrested, but the driver of the van used in the Barcelona attack remained at large and the manhunt intensified for the perpetrators of the latest European rampage claimed by the Islamic State group.

Authorities were still reeling from the Barcelona attack when police in Cambrils, about 130 km to the south, fatally shot five people near the town’s boardwalk who had plowed into a group of tourists and locals with their blue Audi 3. Six people, including a police officer, were injured.

Catalonia’s interior minister, Joaquim Forn, told Onda Cero radio that the five killed in a subsequent shootout with police were wearing fake bomb belts.

The Cambrils attack came hours after a white van veered onto Barcelona’s picturesque Las Ramblas promenade and mowed down pedestrians, zig-zagging down the strip packed with locals and tourists from around the world.

He told Onda Cero that the Cambrils and Barcelona attacks werebeinginvestigatedtogether, as well as a Wednesday night explosion in the town of Alcanar

in which one person was killed.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, saying on its Aamaq news agency that the attack was carried out by “soldiers of the Islamic State” in response to the group’s calls for followers to target countries participating in the coalition trying to drive it from Syria and Iraq.

Spanish news outlets named one of the detained as Driss Oukabir, but reports said he went to police in Ripoll to report that his identity documents had been stolen. Various Spanish media said the IDs with his name were found in the attack van and that he claimed his brother might have stolen them. LONDON An Australian woman has had a lucky escape for the third time this year after she escaped the Islamic State’s attack in Barcelona – she was present during the terrorist assaults in Paris and London.

Julia Monaco, a resident of Melbourne, was shopping in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas avenue when a white van ploughed through tourists, leaving at least 13 dead. She called it a terrifying experience.

“Genuinely terrifying experience. One minute I’m shopping for tshirts, the next I’m running to get away from the windows #barcelona,” she tweeted. On June 3, she was in London when three knifemen went on a stabbing spree and killed eight people. “I am in #London and safe, but sirens are a constant and police everywhere. Surreal,” she had tweeted then.

Just days later, she was in Paris when a man attacked a policeman with a hammer at the NotreDame cathedral before he was subdued. But these experiences have not deterred her from leading a normal life — if anything, they have made her resolve to see the world even stronger.

“I don’t feel like I want to go home,” she told 3AW Melbourne, an Australian radio channel. “I feel like I want to stay here and not let them – whoever they may be – win. I’m going to see what I came here to see.”

Islamist militants have staged a string of attacks across Europe in the past 13 months.