The jihadist behind the wheel of the Barcelona van attack also stabbed a man to death and took his car to escape, Catalonian cops said Monday, as they upped the…
The jihadist behind the wheel of the Barcelona van attack also stabbed a man to death and took his car to escape, Catalonian cops said Monday, as they upped the death toll from last week’s carnage to 15.
Catalan Interior Minister Joaquim Forn told Catalunya Radio on Monday that “everything indicates” that Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, was behind the wheel of the van that plowed into pedestrians along the packed Las Ramblas boulevard .
“We have to talk to European police to notify them of the identity because this person… is likely being sought in all European countries, ” Forn said, Agence France-Presse reported.
The unidentified 15th victim from the twin attacks in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils was found stabbed in a car in Barcelona .
“We are raising the number of victims from 14 to 15 to include the victim in the vehicle found in Sant Just, ” he told reporters.
Investigators have zeroed in on the small border town of Ripoll, at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains, where several of the suspects — including Abouyaaquob — grew up or lived in.
Police raided more homes in Ripoll on Monday, Forn said.
Police tweeted four images of Abouyaaqoub wearing a striped top and with short, dark hair, and asked the public to “share as much (information) as possible.”
A Moroccan imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, also has come under scrutiny as he is believed to have radicalized youths in Ripoll.
Authorities said the imam had spent time in prison and had once been in contact with a suspect wanted on terrorism charges, but they provided no further details.
In Belgium, the mayor of the Vilvorde region told AFP that Satty spent time in the Brussels suburb of Machelen between January and March 2016.
On the other side of Brussels, the notorious Molenbeek suburb emerged as a hotbed of international jihadists after the Brussels bombings in March 2016 and the Paris attacks in late 2015 .
In the Moroccan town of M’ rirt, Abouyaaqoub’s relatives accused the imam of radicalizing the young man as well as his brother Houssein.
“Over the last two years, Younes and Houssein began to radicalize under the influence of this imam, ” their grandfather told AFP.
A neighbor close to the Abouyaaquob family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Satty “had recruited Moroccans of Ripoll and planned the attacks”.
But Ali Assid, president of the Annour Islamic community that runs the mosque in Ripoll, said the imam “behaved like a normal person here”.
“He never sent a radical message, all he preached was really Islam. If he is behind all that, there he must be showing us one face in the mosque and showing another face outside, ” Assid told SER radio.
Police have raised the possibility that Satty was killed in an explosion at a house in Alcanar believed to be the suspects’ bomb factory, where police uncovered a cache of 120 gas canisters.
The suspected jihadists had been preparing bombs for “one or more attacks in Barcelona, ” regional police chief Josep Lluis Trapero told reporters, revealing that traces of triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive favored by ISIS, also had been found.
The suspects accidentally caused an explosion at the house on the eve of Thursday’s attack in Barcelona — likely forcing them to modify their deadly plans .
With Post Wires
