Police in Spain: Extremists had planned massive bomb attack
Spain — Police put up scores of roadblocks across northeast Spain on Sunday in hopes of capturing a fugitive suspect from the 12-member Islamic extremist cell that staged two vehicle attacks and police say apparently plotted much deadlier carnage using explosives favored by Islamic State militants.
Complicating the manhunt, though, was the fact that police have so far been unable to identify with certainty who is at large.
While police have names for the 12 members of the cell, three people technically remained unaccounted for: two believed killed when the house where the plot was being hatched exploded Wednesday and a suspected fugitive, Catalan police official Josep Lluis Trapero said Sunday.
Trapero declined to confirm that Younes Abouyaaquoub, a 22-yearBARCELONA, old Moroccan, was the suspected fugitive who allegedly drove the van that plowed down Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade Thursday, killing 13 people and injuring 120. Hours later in the seaside town of Cambrils, another attack killed one person and injured others.
Another police official confirmed 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 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 Barcelona. Trapero confirmed that more than 100 tanks of butane gas were found at the Alcanar house that exploded, as well as ingredients for making the explosive TATP, which Islamic State used in attacks in Paris and Brussels.
The investigation was also focused on a missing imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, who police think might have died in the Alcanar explosion. Trapero confirmed the imam was part of the investigation.