Catalonia fertile ground for terrorists

DESPITE its long experience in fighting terrorism, Spain failed this past week to prevent two deadly attacks in Catalonia – a key tourist magnet but also the Spanish region most vulnerable to such assaults, analysts say.

Spain has five decades of experience of fighting against the Basque separatist group ETA.

But it was jolted to another dimension of terrorism in 2004 when it suffered Europe’s deadliest Islamist attack to date.

During the morning rush hour of March 11 of that year, bombs packed with nails exploded on four commuter trains heading into Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring almost 2 000.

In the aftermath of the carnage, Madrid overhauled its security forces.

It bolstered its police and intelligence services with new hires, recruited translators and reinforced its cooperation with neighbouring France and Morocco, a terrorism expert at Complutense University in Madrid, Mikel Buesa, said.

Authorities also started routinely detaining suspects as a preventive measure, he added.

Additionally, “self-indoctrination” over the internet with the intent of carrying out an attack became a crime in 2015, easing the process of such early detentions.

This measure has been credited with helping to spare Spain from the terror attacks that have plagued its European neighbours.

But the jihadist threat has risen since last year, when Islamist websites named as a target “Al Andalus” – the name of Spanish territories governed until 1492 by Muslims better known as Moors. And experts are particularly worried about the concentration of jihadists in Catalonia, home to the biggest community of Muslims in Spain.

As many are new arrivals, there has until now been less risk of radicalisation than elsewhere in Europe.

But police warn that it may have been a case of rapid radicalisation, with the suspects turning to extremism in just a few months.

For the security forces, that is the biggest headache — because unlike returnees from the Middle Eastern war zones, such potential jihadists are difficult to detect. — AFP