Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido repeatedly promised on Saturday Aug. 19 that after the Islamic State’s car attacks Thursday and Friday had left 14 dead and more than 130 injured in two Spanish cities, the terrorist network responsible for the violence had been “fully dismantled” and no longer posed a threat.
That assurance was meant to calm the jittery public and visitors, but was far from representing all the facts..
DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counterterrorism sources report that the clandestine ISIS cell which ran those attacks from a base in the small Ripoli, near Spain’s Pyrenean border with France, has indeed gone out of business. But it was only one branch of a broad terror network stretching out from Morocco across at least six European countries: Spain, France, Germany, Belgium Holland, and as far north as Finland, where a Moroccan “refugee” Friday stabbed to death two women in the southwestern town of Turku.
There are troubling signs that the attacks in Spain and Finland were no more than the opening shots of a major onslaught in preparation by this Islamic State network. Unusually, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in Cambrils, Spain, after first claiming the prior outrage on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas promenade. The second claim cited both attacks, substantiating the link in an ongoing chain of events. The bomb-making workshop, which accidentally blew up at Acrona, also provided lethal evidence of an organization bent on sowing death on a massive scale.
In Cambrils, police shot dead all five terrorists, after they used a vehicle to replicate the Barcelona outrage, killing one person and injuring seven. Four suspects are in police custody.
The Spanish Minister did not of course disclose the events leading up to the Catalan attacks. Our sources can reveal, however, that they go back to May 8, when Spanish and Moroccan intelligence agencies working together uncovered a dangerous ISIS network which had sent out shoots across Europe through Moroccan Tangiers and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Catalonia was to be their new address and theater of operations. READ MORE
