Rental vans linked to fugitive

● Terror cell has been dismantled but hunt for driver continues ● Security heightened and threat alert remains at level four

of Barcelona on the road to Ripoll, where all the main attack suspects lived, and the third was found in Ripoll itself.

Police believe the cell wanted to load the vans with explosives for a big attack, but their plans changed after the house where their plot was being hatched blew up on Wednesday in Alcanar.

The investigation is also focusing on a missing imam who police believe could have died in that house explosion.

Police believe Abdelbaki Es Satty radicalised the young men in the extremist cell.

Spanish interior minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said five members of the cell were shot dead, four were in custody and as many as two were killed in an explosion.

He said no new attacks were imminent, the country’s terrorist threat alert will be maintained at level four, and security at popular events and tourist sites around the country will be reinforced.

Mossos, Catalonia’s police force, said the cell involved 12 people and they were still looking for one who fled.

Meanwhile, mourners gathered for a mass in Barcelona where King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia joined politicians at the Sagrada Familia basilica to honour the 14 people killed and all those injured in the attacks.

Some 34 nationalities were among those wounded in Las Ramblas and in Cambrils, which lies around 70 miles to the south west.

The victim of the second assault in Cambrils – bringing the death toll to 14 – has been identified as a Spanish woman.

Family members and government officials have said a Belgian and a Canadian are also among the dead following the attack in Barcelona.

On Friday it emerged another suspect, Moussa Oukabir, who is thought to have rented the van, was among five men shot dead as they launched a second attack in the coastal town of Cambrils.

The teenager, said to be 17 or 18, is suspected of using his brother’s documents to hire the vehicle that ploughed through pedestrians in the tourist hotspot on Thursday evening.

He reportedly died along with Said Aallaa, 19, and Mohamed Hychami, 24, who were part of a group that mounted a similar attack in Cambrils that left one woman dead and six people injured.

The identities of the other two dead attackers are yet to be confirmed by police.

Four men, aged 21, 27, 28 and 34, who were arrested in connection with the attack remain in custody.

Three are Moroccan and one Spanish, and police said none of them was previously known to the security services for terrorrelated reasons.

Moussa Oukabir’s older brother, Driss Oukabir, is reported to be one of those detained.

Police said the terrorists behind the rampage were preparing bigger attacks, with the suspected gas explosion on Wednesday in Alcanar believed to have robbed the killers of materials to use in larger-scale operations.

The attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils took place around eight hours apart on Thursday afternoon and in the early hours of Friday. Police said that none of the 12 cell members had “precedents that linked them to terrorism, including the imam”.

At a press conference yesterday, police official Josep Lluis Trapero said their theory was that the group had planned “one or more attacks with explosives” in the city.