Another terrorist attack in Spain foiled

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.

: 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.