Spanish police link three rental vans to Moroccan hunted after terror attacks
Spanish police are still searching for Younes Abouyaaqoub, the suspected driver of the van used in the massacre on Las Ramblas.
Police in Spain have linked three rental vans to the fugitive at the centre of a manhunt following terror attacks in Barcelona and a nearby seaside resort.
Spanish authorities said the terror cell responsible for the attacks has been dismantled, but the search is still on for Younes Abouyaaqoub, a 22-year-old Moroccan named in Spanish media as the suspected driver of the van used in the massacre on Las Ramblas that left 13 dead and at least 120 injured.
A police official said all three vans were rented using the credit card of Abouyaaquoub, who remains at large and is the focus of a manhunt in north-east Spain, the Associated Press reported.
The official said one of the vans was used in the Barcelona attack, while another was found in Vic, 44 miles north of Barcelona on the road to Ripoll, where all the main attack suspects lived, and the third was found in Ripoll itself.
AP said police believe the cell wanted to load the vans with explosives for a big attack, but their plans changed after the house where their plot was being hatched blew up on Wednesday in Alcanar.
The investigation is also focusing on a missing imam who police believe could have died in that house explosion.
Police believe Abdelbaki Es Satty radicalised the young men in the extremist cell, AP reported.
Spanish interior minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said five members of the cell were shot dead, four were in custody and as many as two were killed in an explosion.
Mossos, Catalonia’s police force, said the cell involved 12 people and they were still looking for one who fled, but they had yet to confirm the identities of those killed in the explosion.
Meanwhile, mourners gathered for a mass in Barcelona where King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia joined politicians at the Sagrada Familia basilica to honour the 14 people killed and all those injured in the attacks.
Some 34 nationalities were among those wounded in Las Ramblas and in Cambrils, which lies around 70 miles to the south west.
Catalan authorities said they have identified some of the victims of the attack in Barcelona as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Spanish-Argentine and American.
The victim of the second assault in Cambrils – bringing the death toll to 14 – has been identified as a Spanish woman.
Family members and government officials have said a Belgian and a Canadian are also among the dead following the attack in Barcelona.
