Spanish police on Friday shot and killed five people carrying bomb belts who were connected to the Barcelona van attack that killed at least 13, as the manhunt intensified for the perpetrators of Europe’s latest rampage claimed by the Islamic State group.
The Catalan government said police in the popular seaside resort of Cambrils, south of Barcelona, were responding to a second terrorist attack early Friday when they fatally shot five people near the town’s seaside boardwalk.
Spanish media reported that a car had plowed into a police vehicle and civilians in Cambrils, and that officers had shot the attackers, one of whom brandished a knife. Six people, including a police officer, were injured. The bomb squad detonated the bomb belts.
The Cambrils attack came hours after a white van veered onto Barcelona’s picturesque Las Ramblas promenade and mowed down pedestrians, zig-zagging down the strip packed with locals and tourists from around the world. Fourteen people were killed and 100 were injured, 15 of them seriously.
The authorities in Spain had said earlier that police were working on the theory that the Cambrils and Barcelona attacks were connected, as well as a Wednesday night explosion in the town of Alcanar in which one person was killed.
The Islamic State group 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.
Two other suspects were arrested Thursday: one a Spanish national from Melilla, a Spanish-run Mediterranean seafront enclave in North Africa, and the other a Moroccan. Police declined to identify them. The arrests took place in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll and in Alcanar, where a gas explosion in a house is being investigated for a possible connection.
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.
The Catalan regional government said people from 34 countries were among those killed and injured in Barcelona. Authorities said one of the dead was Belgian and an Australian was unaccounted for. France said 26 of its citizens were injured; others were from Australia, Greece, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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.”
This bloodshed was Spain’s deadliest attack since 2004, when al-Qaida-inspired 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 it declared a cease-fire in 2011.
