Attacks in Spain fit a larger plot
The violent incidents in Barcelona and Cambrils are suspected to be born of a bigger conspiracy that can be traced back to the quiet town of Alcanar
When an earth-shaking explosion on Wednesday blew apart a house outside Alcanar, a town surrounded by olive groves and holiday homes overlooking the Mediterranean, Spanish police first blamed it on a gas leak. “Nothing ever happens here,” mayor Alfons Monserrat said.
Police now believe that tiny Alcanar may have been the incubator for a conspiracy far more ambitious than even the van attacks in Catalonia that killed 14 people and injured more than 80. All but one of the casualties occurred on Thursday afternoon on the Ramblas, Barcelona’s central thoroughfare. It was Spain’s worst terror attack in more than a decade, and the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
The Alcanar blast, they suspect, was a mistake by the plotters, who had intended to make a powerful bomb, place it in a van and detonate it in the crowded centre of Barcelona. That plan disintegrated along with at least 12 butane gas canisters that were discovered in the ruins of the house on Wednesday night.
Four men have been detained in the case, and three more remained at large, according to Maj Josep Lluis Trapero, a senior police official in Spain’s Catalonia region. Investigators are still trying to determine the full extent of the network. Five of the suspects are dead, at least three of them appearing to be so young that they could not have grown beards. They were killed by police during a second attack, in the holiday town of Cambrils on the coast early Friday.
While some of the other recent European terror attacks have been opportunistic hit-and-runs by individuals acting on their own, this was a comparatively complicated plot that police say involved at least two cells working in several different locations across Catalonia.
The story also unfolded in Ripoll, hometown of one of the young men, Moussa Oukabir, 17, who was killed in Cambrils. His brother Driss Oukabir, 28, was arrested after his identity documents were found to have been used to rent the van used to carry out the attack on Las Ramblas. At least one other person from Ripoll has been detained.
There were few indications that the brothers had come under the influence of radical Islam. Ripoll is a mountain town northwest of Barcelona of about 10,000 people, and Moussa and Driss Oukabir, both of Moroccan descent, lived there with their mother and sisters.
Among neighbours, friends and former employers, no one saw any outward sign of budding extremism. The elder brother, Driss, spoke perfect Catalan as well as Spanish and was not religious. He was known as a small time marijuana dealer, but nothing more.
Moussa was well liked by everyone. He also spoke perfect Catalan, said a neighbour. His sisters, Hafida and Hanane, described him to their former employer at Les Graelles, a local restaurant, as polite, “having really good marks in school” and eager to study. “He didn’t go to parties,” said the restaurant’s manager, Rosa, who said she was afraid to give her last name.
There was no sign that the family was particularly religious, she added. Neither sister wore a headscarf except when they were coming from the mosque and never when they were working.
The family lived in a nondescript apartment building near the southern edge of town. It is social housing for lower income, working-class people.
There were three Spanish-Moroccan families in the building and Moussa, the youngest of the Oukabir children, was good friends with them as well as other children who lived there, neighbours said. One 15-year old Catalan boy in the building said he used to go swimming with Moussa and played with him by the river that runs through town, and that they rode their bikes together.
“Moussa never spoke about religion,” said the boy’s mother, Marche, who lived in the apartment directly next door. He was a good kid, just like you or me.”
She said Moussa and Driss’ parents had recently separated, but the family was friendly so she was shocked when masked police burst into the building at 7am on Friday and broke into the Oukabir apartment. She did not know if they found anything.
At the mosque closest to the family’s home, Ali Yassini, who works with the mosque’s Islamic Council, said he had barely any contact with the brothers. “We don’t know them; we saw them maybe once a year,” he said, adding that among Muslim youth in Ripoll there is a generational divide. “The young ones want to party, these kids, 24 years and younger, they feel they are in jail here.”
On Thursday afternoon, one of the attackers arrived at a branch of Telefurgo, a car rental firm, some 15 miles north of Barcelona. Using the identity documents of Driss Oubakar, he paid €59.90 (2,340 baht), on top of a €150 deposit, to hire a white Fiat Talento, the firm told Spanish journalists.
Chander Gurnani, 34, who runs a souvenir shop in central Barcelona, first saw that white Fiat Talento around 5pm on Thursday as it ploughed into a young woman, sending her flying through the air. Then it mowed down an old man whose head began to gush blood. Rushing from his shop, Gurnani, an Indian immigrant, said he took the man in his arms — before realising some 30 seconds later that he was dead.
So began Thursday’s attack on Las Ramblas, the long boulevard that connects the city’s port with its most central districts. The van veered south from Placa de Catalunya, the city’s most recognisable square, zigzagging to hit as many people as possible.
After mowing down at least a dozen people across a stretch of some 490 metres, and slamming into dozens more, it crashed into displays of cheap souvenirs — phone covers, bracelets, drawings and even oven gloves, skidding to a halt on a public artwork by Joan Miro, the Catalan artist. The driver quickly melted into the crowds. Those stuck in the shops and bars of Las Ramblas had little idea about the events that had led them to flee there.
Outside, however, a picture of a complex operation was beginning to emerge. A second van was discovered in Vic, north of Barcelona; the police now think the assailants used it as a getaway car to help them leave central Barcelona after the attack.
Photographs of Driss Oukabir, whom police had quickly linked to the van hire, began to circulate — prompting him to turn himself in at a police station in Ripoll. He claimed his documents had been stolen, and that he was not the man who hired the van.
Down in Alcanar, another man was arrested in connection to the attack. Then, the Islamic State, also known as Isis or Isil, claimed responsibility for the events, in a statement issued through their news agency.
For many survivors, shock and fear began to give way to relief. A Spanish tour guide, Laia Escribano, had unwittingly taken a group of tourists to the street just minutes after the attack began and gradually realised how narrow her escape had been.
“I am lucky to be alive,” said Ms Escribano, 31. “If the attack was 10 minutes later, I would have been right there with the students on the tour.”
But as Thursday rolled into Friday, relief gave way to renewed terror. In Cambrils, a small seaside resort town about 80km south of Barcelona, another car attack was unfolding.
At 1am, five assailants in an Audi A3 hit a group of civilians before police officers fatally shot five of them, one of them Moussa Oukabir. A pedestrian later died after being hit by the car, and the police have confirmed that the Cambrils attack was committed by the same network that sent a van to Barcelona.
In a night of strange developments, however, the oddest of all was perhaps the news from Alcanar. Twenty-four hours after the authorities considered the explosion there a gas leak, the story came full circle.
Alcanar, the police now suggest, was not just a sleepy holiday town. It may have been a place where the attacks were planned — news that shocked local residents.
“You might think all sorts of things,” said Nuria Gil, 50, one of the few local residents who lives here year-round, “but not that you have terrorists as neighbours.”