Spain police kill five after 13 die in van attacks
BARCELONA: Spanish police have killed five people in a counter-terrorist operation to stop a ‘second attempted terrorist assault’ following Thursday evening’s van attack on pedestrians in Barcelona’s tourist district of Las Ramblas that killed 13 people and left dozens injured.
Just 8 hours after the first attack in Barcelona, five people wearing explosive vests drove a car into pedestrians in Cambrils, a coastal town 120km south of Barcelona, before being shot dead by the police. Six civilians and one police officer were injured.
The police also said they were going to conduct “several controlled explosions” in Cambrils.
The Catalan government early on Friday said the two incidents were linked.
Thursday’s incident was being treated by police as a terrorist attack, the worst in Spain since the Madrid train bombings in 2004. Over the past two years terrorists in Stockholm, Nice, Berlin and London have used vehicles as weapons.
Joaquim Forn, the Catalan interior minister, said that more than 100 people had been injured in the van attack, 15 of them seriously. Two people have been detained.
Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, travelled to Barcelona and said the city has been “hit by jihad terrorism like other cities have been throughout the world”.
He added: “Terrorists will never defeat a united people that loves freedom over barbarism. The whole of Spain is with the victims and [their] families.”
Rajoy declared three days of national mourning.
Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president, said: “Catalonia has been a land of peace. We will not let a minority end our way of life which has been forged over the centuries.”
Three suspects have been detained. One was identified as Driss Oukabir, a 28-year-old Moroccan national who was living in Ripoll, a town north of Barcelona. Another man from Ripoll was arrested, police said.
The other was from the Spanish enclave of Melilla in north Africa, police said. They were arrested in two different towns in Catalonia, Ripoll and Alcanar. None of the men is the driver of the van, who witnesses said had fled on foot.
Separately, police said that the van attack appeared to be linked to an explosion at a house in Alcanar in the early hours of Thursday in which one person died and another was injured.
The Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police, also said that another man had knocked over two police officers as he sped through a police checkpoint on the outskirts of Barcelona and was later found dead in his vehicle.
Javier Zaragoza, chief prosecutor for Spain’s High Court, said the attackers in both Barcelona and Cambrils had no previous terror offences.
Isis claimed responsibility for the attack through its Amaq news agency, although it has previously tried to take credit for atrocities later found to be unconnected to the militant group. – Samaa/Agencies 
Story first published: 18th August 2017
Article source: https://www.samaa.tv/international/2017/08/spain-police-kill-five-13-die-van-attacks/