Extremists planned huge attack as police discover gas arsenal
barcelona — Police put up scores of roadblocks across northeast Spain on Sunday in hopes of capturing a fugitive suspect from the 12-member extremist cell that staged two vehicle attacks and plotted much deadlier carnage using explosives favored by Daesh militants.
Complicating the manhunt, though, was the fact that police have so far been unable to officially identify who exactly is at large.
While police have identified the 12 members of the cell, three people remain unaccounted for: two believed killed when the house where the plot was being hatched exploded on Wednesday, and a suspected fugitive, Catalan police official Josep Lluis Trapero told reporters on Sunday.
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 Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade Thursday, killing 13 people and injuring 120. Another attack hours later killed one person and injured others in seaside town of Cambrils.
“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 the northeastern town of 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 confirmed 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 the Daesh group in attacks in Paris and Brussels. —