Spain attack suspect may have crossed into France

Barcelona, August 20 

The Spanish police hunting for a suspect after the Barcelona van attack said on Sunday they could not rule out that he had slipped over the border into France.

Spanish police said security operations were under way in Catalonia and on the French border as they try to find Moroccan-born Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, who they believe is the only one of 12 suspects still at large.

Others have been arrested, shot by police or killed in an explosion at a house in Catalonia a day before Thursday’s van attack on Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s most famous boulevard.

“We don’t have any specific information on this but it cannot be ruled out,” Catalan police chief Josep Lluis Trapero told a news conference in Barcelona when asked if Abouyaaqoub could have crossed into France.

Spanish media have said Abouyaaqoub was suspected of being the driver, who fled after the attack. Trapero said he could not confirm who was driving, but said investigators believed only one person was in the van.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, in which a van travelling at high-speed drove through crowds of tourists and local people walking along Las Ramblas, leaving a trail of dead and injured from 34 countries.

Hours later, the police shot dead five men wearing fake explosive belts in the Catalan seaside resort of Cambrils after they rammed holidaymakers with a car and stabbed others, killing one woman.

A police source in France told Reuters on Friday that police there had been looking for the driver of a white Renault Kangoo van that may be connected to the attacks. French media said on Saturday the vehicle had been found near Barcelona.

Abouyaaqoub’s mother Hannou Ghanimi, speaking to reporters, urged her son to give himself up to police, saying she preferred him being in prison to being dead.

The attacks were the deadliest in Spain for more than a decade. In little more than a year, militants have used vehicles as weapons to kill 130 people in France, Germany, Britain, Sweden and Spain. — Reuters

Extremists planned massive attack: police

• The police put up scores of roadblocks across northeast Spain on Sunday in hopes of capturing a fugitive suspect from the 12-member Islamic extremist cell that staged two vehicle attacks and plotted much deadlier carnage using explosives favoured by Islamic State militants
• A police official said three vans tied to the peobe were rented with Younes Abouyaaquoub’s credit card: The one used in the Las Ramblas carnage, another found in the town of Ripoll, where all the main attack suspects lived, and a third in Vic, on the road between the two
• Police believe the cell members had planned to fill the vans with explosives and create a massive attack in the Catalan capital. The police confirmed that more than 100 tanks of butane gas were found at the Alcanar house that exploded, as well as ingredients of the explosive TATP