As Spain mourns, hunt intensifies for van driver in Barcelona attack
BARCELONA, Spain — Spain’s royal family and prime minister joined dignitaries and Muslim leaders Sunday to mourn the 14 people killed in twin attacks last week, the deadliest case of terrorism in the country since 2004.
As the nation grieved, the hunt continued for Younes Abouyaaqoub, a 22-year-old Moroccanborn man who authorities said might have driven a van that mowed down pedestrians on Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s famous promenade, on Thursday afternoon, killing 13. A 14th person died in a car attack hours later in the seaside town of Cambrils, 70 miles to the south.
Abouyaaqoub is believed to be the only member of a cell of at least 12 men who is still on the run, said Maj. Josep Lluís Trapero, police chief in Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, but whether he was still in Spain was not clear.
Catalan police said Sunday that they had unearthed more than 100 gas cylinders in the rubble of a house thought to be used by the Barcelona attackers as a bomb factory — a vivid indication that an even larger assault had been planned.
An explosion Wednesday night that killed at least two people destroyed the house, in Alcanar, a town about 120 miles southwest of Barcelona. At first thought to be a gas explosion, the blast now appears to have been the hub of a wider plot to sow terror.
Some of the 12 members of the cell had occupied the house for at least six months, Trapero said. He said that one man injured in the explosion in Alcanar was arrested after the attack in Barcelona.
“There is explosive material that keeps appearing among the ruins, and it’s a very slow process,” Trapero said of the investigation at the house, adding that “it will probably take days.”
Authorities were also focusing on Ripoll, a town about 70 miles north of Barcelona, not far from the Pyrenees.
Ripoll was the home of most of the suspects involved in the terrorist plot, according to authorities, including Abdelbaki Essati, the local imam, one of two men who may have died in the Wednesday explosion.
Five of the 10 other men believed to have been involved in the cell were killed in Cambrils, and four are under arrest, officials said. Abouyaaqoub is thought to have been the driver of the van. Authorities said it was possible that he had slipped into France.
Investigators are trying to establish the role of the imam, Essati, in the cell. He had been connected to extremists more than a decade earlier, and he shared an apartment in the town of Vilanova that police raided in 2006 as part of an investigation into another cell that also recruited fighters for Iraq, according to local news reports.
The original plan for attack involved at least three vans, as well as the Audi car that five assailants used in the attack in Cambrils. Trapero said investigators were using fingerprints from the vehicles to confirm the exact whereabouts of the assailants.
“In recent months, this group had planned one or more attacks in the city of Barcelona with which they hoped to do a lot more damage than what they already managed,” he said.
Authorities called on citizens to join a demonstration Saturday to condemn terrorism and extremism.
“They tried to bring us to our knees in Barcelona, but we’re going to get up even stronger,” said Carles Puigdemont, leader of Catalonia.