Father of Barcelona suspects blames imam
The father of two of the suspects in the Barcelona attack blamed a neighbourhood imam, who is missing and believed dead, for turning the group of local youths into terrorists.
Abdelbaki Es Satty, who was a prayer leader at two small mosques in the Catalan town of Ripoll, disappeared from his apartment last Tuesday.
The authorities believe that Satty may have been killed in an explosion a day later at an abandoned villa in the coastal town of Alcanar that the extremists had turned into a bomb factory.
Hechami Gasi, father of Mohamed and Omar Hychami, residents of Ripoll who were killed last week, said he suspected his sons were radicalised by the mysterious interloper.
“I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know how to feel, they’re my sons but look at the evil they’ve done,” said Mr Gasi, whose sons were shot dead in Cambrils on Friday morning. “The imam must have put these ideas in their heads. They were good boys.”
Officials are working on the assumption that Satty was making final preparations for a spectacular attack on Barcelona. It appears he recruited the suspects identified by the security forces: the Hychami brothers, Driss and Moussa Oukabir and Younes Abouyaaqoub, who is still on the run. Said Aallaa, another suspected member of the cell, is from a town 13 kilometres away.
Satty moved to the Catalan town – where five of those in the cell grew up – after he was released from prison in 2014. While the authorities confirmed that they have made positive identifications from remains found in a destroyed complex in Alcanzar, there is no official word that Satty was indeed at the scene.
Satty had been jailed on cannabis-smuggling offences in 2010. The Moroccan-born man reportedly associated with Rachid Aglif, who was jailed for 18 years for participating in the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 192.
According to Ripoll’s Annour Islamic community, Satty led prayers at two district mosques but stopped participating in acts of worship two months ago. At that time, he had told residents he was moving to Belgium, a country that has hosted terror cells with links to ISIL organisers in Syria. It appears, however, that Satty spent the next few weeks between his apartment in Ripoll and the bomb factory in Alcanar.
Ripoll Muslim leaders yesterday rejected Satty’s actions, reiterating their “complete commitment to the fight against any form of terrorism”.