Spanish police shoot, kill suspect they say drove van in Barcelona
Moroccan man was subject of manhunt since last week’s deadly attack
The man suspected of driving the van that plowed into pedestrians last week in Barcelona, killing 13, was killed by police Monday.
Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, a Moroccan national, was wearing a fake explosives belt when he was shot in Subirats, a town west of Barcelona, Catalan regional police said. Abouyaaqoub had been the subject of a Europe-wide manhunt since Thursday’s attack.
Regional Police Chief Josep Luis Trapero said police fired after Abouyaaqoub shouted, “Allah is great” in Arabic and lifted his shirt to show the bomb belt that turned out to be fake.
Abouyaaqoub was spotted outside a train station 33 miles west of Barcelona Monday afternoon.
Trapero said Abouyaaqoub’s death means the group responsible for last week’s attack has been broken. “The arrest of this person was the priority for the police because it closed the detention and dismantling of the group that we had identified,” he said.
Catalan Interior Minister Joaquim Forn said a man was found stabbed to death in a car believed to be used by one of the attackers in the van rampage to flee.
Earlier, Forn told Catalunya Radio that Abouyaaqoub was the last member of the 12-man Islamist extremist cell at large.
Forn said “everything indicates” that Abouyaaqoub was the driver of the white van that mowed people down in
Las Ramblas promenade Thursday.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hours later, members of the cell killed one person and injured six others when a car hit people in the coastal town of Cambrils.
Five suspects were shot dead by police in that incident. Four suspects were arrested.
The Spanish newspaper El Pais published images Monday of a person it said was Abouyaaqoub fleeing Las Ramblas on foot after the van attack.
The three images show a man walking through La Boqueria market.
Trapero said a dozen members of the terrorist cell had stashed more than 100 gas canisters and planned to use them in vehicle attacks, El País reported.
The plot was thwarted when a house in which the butane gas was stored blew up Wednesday, Trapero said. He said at least two suspected terrorists died in the explosion.
At the time, authorities thought a gas leak was responsible for the blast.
“It’s evident that the person who committed the van attack can’t be dead because the explosion happened before the attack in Las Ramblas,” Forn told Catalunya Radio.
One American, Jared Tucker,
42, was among those killed by the van in Barcelona.
The California resident had been celebrating his first wedding anniversary with his wife, Heidi Nunes-Tucker, 40.
Abdelbaki Es Satty, an imam in the town of Ripoll in northeastern Spain — where a number of the suspects lived — is suspected of radicalizing the younger attackers.
Es Satty became the imam of one of the town’s two mosques in
2015 but was removed from the position after he went to Morocco for three months this summer, according to Reuters.
He knew some of the extremists jailed for the train bombings in Madrid that killed 192 people in 2004, El Pais reported.
Trapero said Monday that the imam was one of the suspects who died in the house explosion in the coastal town of Alcanar.