Last night, in the seaside Barcelona town of Las Ramblas, five terrorists drove a van through a crowd of people and killed 13 of them. They injured a further 100 in the devastating attack, before a second vehicle plowed through more people in Cambrils just hours later, that time wounding seven. Following the second attack in Cambrils, the local police officers shot and killed all five suspects in the attack.
ISIS, of course, have claimed responsibility for the attack in Barcelona, which comes as a surprise to absolutely no one. However, this claim has yet to be verified or confirmed officially.
Driss Oukabir, the first suspect to be named and the third to be arrested (in the northern Barcelona town of Ripoll), reportedly told police that his ID documentation was stolen before he could use it to rent the van.
Seven injured in the Cambrils attack
There was a second terrorist attack that took place in the same space of time in the same area with the same modus operandi, which is what happened in London, too. The coastal town of Cambrils, 120 km away from Barcelona, was hit with a vehicular attack in the early hours of this morning. Seven people – six civilians and one police officer – were injured in the attack. Where the Las Ramblas attack utilised a van, the Cambrils one utilised an Audi A3, which was flipped with its back window smashed following the attack.
After the Cambrils attack, police shot and killed all five suspects in the Barcelona terrorist attacks. They were all wearing fake suicide vests like the ones used in the London Bridge attack, which terrorists use to spread fear and make people panic but actually just serves as a pointer towards which ones the police need to shoot.
The fake vests are made by strapping disposable water bottles wrapped in duct tape to your chest. The head of the Spanish Terrorism law court, the Audiencia Nacional, Javier Zaragoza, has said that the suspects killed had no established connections with Islamist extremism.
Reuters are reporting that local authorities believe that a terrorist cell of eight people were involved in the planning and execution of the attacks in Barcelona.
An unnamed source claimed that the attack was plotted to be carried out with gas canisters, but in the end, they obviously went with the more popular hitting-a-crowd-of-people-with-a-vehicle method that ISIS are doing these days.
The police investigation is moving fast
The police and officials in Barcelona are moving on with the investigation quickly. They’ve linked the attack in Las Ramblas and the attack in Cambrils to an earlier explosion that took place in Alcanar, destroying a house. The explosion killed one person and injured at least one more. Now, police are under the impression that the explosion happened because the terrorists were preparing explosives at the house for this attack. Alcanar is located about 124 miles from Barcelona and 56 miles from Cambrils.
There was a firefight at a police roadblock in a town near Barcelona on Thursday during which a man was stabbed to death. However, police are saying that this shootout was not connected with the recent terrorist attacks in the surrounding areas of Barcelona. Despite them saying this, though, they could still be connected. Who knows? The police are currently looking into the potential link. The driver of the car is still being searched for after he stabbed the dead man and took off at the roadblock.
After the Las Ramblas attack near Barcelona, the driver of the van was at large and police were rampantly searching for him. Now, they believe they might have found him, as Spanish police have named an 18-year-old suspect they have arrested, Moussa Oukabir, who is suspected to be the driver of the van.
