The new victim is a man who was found stabbed in a car.
The death toll in the terror attacks in the Catalonia region of northeastern Spain last week rose to 15 on Monday; as Spanish authorities confirmed the identity of the man they believe was the driver of a van that plowed into pedestrians in the center of Barcelona.
Catalan interior minister Joaquim Forn said the new victim is a man who was found stabbed in a car that was believed to be used by one of the attackers to flee.
Earlier, Forn told Catalunya Radio that Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, a Moroccan national, is the last member of the 12-man Islamist extremist cell still at large. A Europe-wide hunt for him is under way.
Forn said that “everything indicates” that Abouyaaqoub was the driver of the white van that mowed people down in Las Ramblas promenade on Thursday, killing 13 people. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
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 have been 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 apparently walking though La Boqueria market.
Catalan regional police chief Josep Lluis Trapero said a dozen members of the cell stashed more than 100 gas canisters and had planned to use them in vehicle attacks, El País reported. The plot was thwarted, however, when the house in which the butane gas was stored blew up Wednesday, Trapero said. He said at least two suspected terrorists died in the explosion.
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At the time, authorities suspected 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.
American Jared Tucker, 42, was among those killed. 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, Spanish media reported.
Es Satty became the imam of one of the town’s two mosques in 2015 but was removed from the position after went to Morocco for three months this summer, according to Reuters. He knew some of the extremists who were jailed for the Madrid train bombings that killed 192 people in 2004, El Pais reported.
Es Satty is believed to have been killed in the explosion at the house that blew up in the coastal town of Alcanar, according to media reports.
Contributing: John Bacon
