The jihadist cell behind last week’s twin attacks in Spain was built around a ‘guru’ and went completely offline to avoid detection by anti-terrorist police, experts said.
The group managed to evade authorities so well that even a giant explosion at their bomb factory in Alcanar, where police later uncovered massive quantities of ingredients to build TATP, was not at first linked to the jihadists.
Meanwhile, police in the northeast Spanish region of Catalonia are coming under growing criticism over the Barcelona van attack that killed 13 people. Two others were killed during the driver’s getaway and in a separate attack further down the coast in Cambrils.
Several Spanish media accused Catalan police on Thursday of failing to properly investigate the Moroccan imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty.
Master of evil: The suicide belt was found at a house in Alcanar, south of Barcelona, where imam Abdelbaki Es Satty died in an explosion last Wednesday
‘Bomb factory’: Abdelbaky Es Satty died in an accidental blast at this suspected bomb-making factory hours before the attacks were launched
Investigators only made the connection between the factory explosion and the terrorist attacks after their vehicle rampages in Barcelona and Cambrils. Experts say the key reason was the way the group was formed
A wider blame game is being played out between central authorities in Madrid and officials in Catalonia, whose leaders are pushing for independence from Spain.
Investigators only made the connection between the factory explosion and the terrorist attacks after their vehicle rampages in Barcelona and Cambrils. Experts say the key reason was the way the group was formed.
The ‘propaganda and recruitment techniques’ are like those of a cult, said Lurdes Vidal, director of the European Institute of the Mediterranean.
‘The role of the family is emphasised, the group is a closed circuit, and everything is done to stop things from getting out,’ she said.
And at the heart of the group, ‘there is a central person who unites everyone, who provides Salafist answers to youths who may have lost their bearings,’ said French former intelligence officer Alain Rodier.
That key person in this case was the Moroccan imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, who was killed in the blast accidentally triggered by the jihadists themselves.
A Belgian policeman told a Catalan colleague in 2016 that the imam was suspicious, but no information was found then to link him to Islamist militancy, a source told Reuters.
The tip-off about the imam was made informally between two police officials from Belgium and Catalonia who knew each other, a source in Catalonia’s regional government said.
‘The communication between the two policemen was not official. They knew each other because they had met in a police seminar,’ the source said, on condition of anonymity.
Police records, however, had turned up nothing on the cleric.
Spanish High Court judge Fernando Andreu on Thursday released, on certain conditions, Salh El Karib, another of the four suspects arrested over the attacks
Mohamed Aallaa, 27, has also been released after being arresed in the aftermath of last week’s attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils
‘The documents show that we had no information about the imam,’ the source said, adding that the only official communication channels of the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, with police in other countries were through Spain’s central government.
The Catalan regional government and Spain’s central government declined to comment.
It remains unclear whether Catalan police made their own attempts to follow up the lead.
The top home affairs official in the Catalan regional government, Joaquim Forn, said on Thursday that Catalan authorities had been unaware of any investigation of the imam or that he could pose a threat, Spanish news agency EFE said.
Es Satty spent around three months in the Belgian town of Vilvoorde, a known centre of Islamist radicalism, between January and March last year.
He later went to Catalonia to be the imam of the small town of Ripoll, where he is suspected of having recruited and radicalised most of the group which carried out last week’s attacks.
Es Satty may have presented two different faces to people of Ripoll, the small town where he and many of the suspects lived, said Alberto Bueno, a member of the International Observatory of Studies on Terrorism.
‘He shows one face when he preaches at the prayer hall in Ripoll, and the other of radicalisation,’ said Bueno, a researcher at the university of Granada, in Southern Spain.
Spain ordered Es Satty’s expulsion from the country after he served a four-year jail term for drug-trafficking but this was annulled by a court in 2015 after Es Satty appealed, court officials have said.
Arrested: Driss Oukabir, left, and Mohamed Houli Chemlal are taken to the Audiencia Nacional court in Madrid for the first hearing on Tuesday
The judge at the time overturned the expulsion order partly because Es Satty had employment roots in Spain, which he said ‘shows his efforts to integrate in Spanish society’.
There was no information before the court at the time to link Es Satty to Islamist terrorism, the officials said.
The unity of the group is further compounded by the fact that many of its members are siblings, noted the expert, pointing out that among the dozen suspects are four sets of brothers.
Yves Trotignon, a former member of France’s anti-terrorist authorities, noted that the set-up featuring relatives was also seen among the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York or the March 11, 2004 train bombing in Madrid.
Hans Bonte, mayor of Vilvoorde, said last week that Es Satty had been ‘intensely screened’ by Belgian police, and he had told Spanish police by email of his whereabouts.
El Pais newspaper quoted Bonte on Thursday as saying he had received a reply from police in Barcelona on March 8 last year.
‘They said the imam had no links to radical groups,’ he said.
Sources close to the investigation told Reuters earlier this week the regional Catalan force may have missed an opportunity to uncover the plot because of procedural errors and a lack of communication among investigators.
While Spain’s attackers had prepared their assaults for months, it is likely that the process of radicalisation began a long time ago, he said.
Thursday’s van attack on the crowded Las Ramblas boulevard in Barcelona killed 13 people and injured more than 100.
Abouyaaqoub, the driver of the white van that killed 15 and wounding more than 100 in Las Ramblas last week, pictured, was killed by police
Alberto Bueno noted that the group had eschewed online social networks and stayed off mobile phones, at a time when anti-terrorist police scour the internet for signs of radicalisation among users.
‘This classic model, with people who know each other and a guru who accompanies the development of the cell goes back 15 to 20 years earlier,’ said Alain Rodier.
Rodier, a former officer in French intelligence, said Spanish experts were fully aware that groups formed around families are particularly tight, because, ‘you’re not going to betray your brother’.
The family connections also ease the process of indoctrination, he said.
Experts also noted that the youth of many of the suspects – some of them as young as 17 – was no accident.
This is a period of life that is potentially volatile, Vidal said, noting that ‘religion was used to get to the youths, in order to have a very strong emotional impact in the construction of their identity.
‘These are Muslims, not converts. An imam is necessary, an incubator who comes from among them, and who convinces them that their faith requires them to take action,’ said Rodier.
‘They may have viewed themselves reconquering Spain as Muslims, … as suggested in the letter found in Alcanar,’ he added.
In the rubble of the Alcanar house, police found a sheet of paper slipped into a green-coloured book.
It read: ‘A brief letter from the soldiers of the Islamic State on the territory of Al Andalous to the crusaders, the sinners, the unjust and the corrupters.’
Aalla owns the car used in the Cambrils attack (pictured), but was granted a conditional release because evidence against him was considered weak
Al Andalous is the name of the territories in modern Spain that until 1492 were by Muslims.
Spanish High Court judge Fernando Andreu on Thursday released, on certain conditions, another of the four suspects arrested over the attacks, a court order said.
Salh El Karib ran an internet cafe in the northeastern Spanish town of Ripoll where most members of the Islamist cell, who were mostly young men of Moroccan descent, lived.
Andreu on Tuesday ordered two suspects jailed while another was freed with conditions.
The other eight known members of the group were killed by police or died in an explosion.
Andreu met high-ranking security officials on Wednesday to set out a common strategy for the probe, a judicial source said.
The source said the meeting was a first step towards integrating the two Spanish police forces – the Civil Guard and the National Police – in the investigation, which had until now been exclusively managed by the Catalan police.
Andreu was due to take a formal decision on this later on Thursday, the source added.
Spain’s Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said on Thursday he did not expect the attacks to have any significant short-term impact on tourism, which accounts for about 11 percent of the Spanish economy.