Terror cell also ‘planned to bomb monuments’

BARCELONA: The terrorist cell in Spain that unleashed a pair of deadly vehicular attacks in mid-august was planning a more lethal, dramatic act.

Its members were going to explode huge bombs at monuments in the centre of the city, according to a court official.

Mohamed Houli Chemlal, 21, who police say is one of the surviving members of the cell, told a court in Madrid this week that the members were assembling bombs in a safe house under the guidance of their imam, who told them he planned to blow himself up during the attack.

Spanish media said Chemlal said one of the possible targets was Antoni Gaudí’s iconic and unfinished Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Sagrada Familia.

The imam appears to have recruited the teens and young men in the terrorist cell from the Moroccan immigrant community in the mountain town of Ripoll, a twohour drive north of Barcelona.

Chemlal’s initial testimony to Judge Fernando Andreu in a closed courtroom on Tuesday was reported widely by Spanish media and sourced to a court official. The judicial source requested anonymity because he was not permitted to brief reporters on the proceedings before a special anti-terrorism tribunal, where the judge is to decide on charges and whether the defendants can be freed on bail.

At least two of the defendants, through their families and friends in Ripoll, have said they were unwitting participants – that they simply rented vans one thought was for moving or sold airline tickets and transferred money.

Chemlal was escorted into the court by police, shackled, with one arm bandaged and wearing hospital pyjamas. He is the lone survivor of an explosion on August 16 that destroyed a house in Alcanar, south of Barcelona.

Police say the house contained 120 tanks for propane gas, alongside residue of a bomb-making material known as TATP and remote-controlled detonators.

Josep Lluís Trapero, chief of the Catalan national police, said his investigators assumed the explosion in Alcanar was an accident, which killed the imam and triggered the cell to launch the vehicular attacks on August 17.

In the first, police say Younes Abouyaaquob, 22, drove a white rental van down La Rambla and killed 13 in a boulevard crowded with international tourists and locals. An hour later, police said, Abouyaaquob stabbed a motorist to death and used his car as a getaway vehicle. Later, five members of the cell drove into a crowd near a police checkpoint and killed a woman bystander.

The Moroccan imam alleged to be at the heart of the plot, Abdelbaki Essati, was sent to prison from 2010 to 2014 for smuggling hashish into Spain. – The Washington Post