CARNAGE ON STREETS
Spanish police escort a woman outside an area cordoned off after a van plowed into a crowd, killing 13 people and injuring 100, in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas district Thursday. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Avan veered onto a promenade Thursday and barrelled down the busy walkway in central Barcelona, swerving back and forth as it mowed pedestrians down and turned a picturesque tourist destination into a bloody killing zone. Thirteen people were killed and 100 were injured, 15 of them seriously, in what authorities called a terror attack.
The late afternoon attack in the city’s Las Ramblas district left victims sprawled in the historic street, spattered with blood or writhing in pain from broken limbs. Others were ushered inside shops by officers with their guns drawn or fled in panic, screaming and carrying young children in their arms.
“It was clearly a terror attack, intended to kill as many people as possible,” Josep Lluis Trapero, a senior police official for Spain’s Catalonia region, told reporters late Thursday.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility, saying in a statement on its Aamaq news agency that the attack was carried out by “soldiers of the Islamic State” in response to the extremist group’s calls for followers to target countries participating in the coalition trying to drive it from Syria and Iraq.
Police earlier Friday morning had said five suspects had been shot and killed in the resort town of Cambrils south of Barcelona during the police response to a terrorist attack in which five civilians and one police officer were wounded.
The police force for Spain’s Catalonia region says the five suspects killed in Cambrils were carrying bomb belts, which were detonated by the force’s bomb squad. The regional police said they cannot say yet how the civilians and police officer in Cambrils were injured. Local media have reported a vehicle crashed into a police car and nearby civilians and police shot the attackers, included one brandishing a knife.
The Catalan regional government said citizens from 24 countries were among the people killed and injured during the Barcelona van attack.
Authorities said the dead included a Belgian and a Greek woman was among the injured. Germany’s Foreign Ministry said it was checking reports that German citizens were among the victims.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called the killings a “savage terrorist attack” and said Spaniards “are not just united in mourning, but especially in the firm determination to beat those who want to rob us of our values and our way of life.”
After the afternoon attack, Las Ramblas went into lockdown. Officers brandishing hand guns and automatic weapons launched a manhunt in the downtown district, ordering stores and cafes and public transport to shut down.
Several hours later authorities reported two arrests, one a Spanish national from Melilla, a Spanish-run Mediterranean seafront enclave in North Africa, and the other a Moroccan.
Trapero said neither of them was the van’s driver, who remained at large.
The arrests took place in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll and in Alcanar, the site of a gas explosion at a house on Wednesday night. Police said they were investigating a possible link between the explosion and Thursday’s attack.
Spanish public broadcaster RTVE and other news outlets named one of the detained as Driss Oukabir, a French citizen of Moroccan origin. RTVE reported said Oukabir went to police in Ripoll to report that his identity documents had been stolen. Various Spanish media said the IDs with his name were found in the attack van and that he claimed his brother might have stolen them.
Media outlets ran photographs of Oukabir they said police had issued to identify one of the suspects. The regional police told the Associated Press that they had not distributed the photograph. They refused to say if he was one of the two detained.
Barcelona is the latest European city to experience a terror attack carried out using a vehicle as a weapon to target a popular tourist destination, after similar attacks in France, Germany, Sweden and Britain.
“London, Brussels, Paris and some other European cities have had the same experience. It’s been Barcelona’s turn today,” said Carles Puigdemont, president of Catalonia’s government.
Thursday’s bloodshed was Spain’s deadliest attack since 2004, when al-Qaidainspired bombers killed 192 people in co-ordinated assaults on Madrid’s commuter trains. In the years since, Spanish authorities have arrested nearly 200 jihadists. The only deadly attacks were bombings claimed by the Basque separatist group ETA that killed five people over the past decade but declared a ceasefire in 2011.
“Unfortunately, Spaniards know the absurd and irrational pain that terrorism causes. We have received blows like this in recent years, but we also know that terrorists can be beaten,” Rajoy said.
Hours after Thursday’s attack, the police force for Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region said troopers searching for the perpetrators shot and killed a man who was in a vehicle that hit two officers at a traffic blockade on the outskirts of Barcelona. But Trapero said the driver’s actions were not linked to the van attack.
Las Ramblas is a wide avenue of stalls and shops that cuts through the centre of Barcelona and is one of the city’s top tourist destinations. It features a pedestrian-only walkway in the centre while cars can travel on either side.
A taxi driver who witnessed Thursday’s attack, Oscar Cano, said the white van suddenly jumped the curb and sped down the central pedestrian area at a high speed for about 500 metres, veering from side to side as it targeted people.