Terror-cell inquiry goes beyond Spain

FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017 file photo, people flee the scene in Barcelona, Spain, after a white van jumped the sidewalk in the historic Las Ramblas district, crashing into a summer crowd of residents and tourists.
FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017 file photo, people flee the scene in Barcelona, Spain, after a white van jumped the sidewalk in the historic Las Ramblas district, crashing into a summer crowd of residents and tourists.

MADRID -- The investigation of attacks that killed 16 people in Barcelona and a nearby town is becoming increasingly international, as police piece together who ordered the carnage and how. The clues include a lightning-fast shopping trip to a Paris suburb and plane tickets to Belgium.

At the center of the probe is an imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, who went from trafficking people and drugs to secretly preaching jihad to young Muslims in northeastern Spain.

He was never directly linked to extremism or recruiting, but he appeared on authorities' radar more than once, spending nine months in an anti-radicalization program in prison. A short time after being released, he managed to pull together a tightly knit group of as many as nine men -- three sets of brothers and their childhood friends, all willing to die for his cause and keep the plot secret.

In addition to the 16 dead, more than 120 people were injured in the August attacks, which were claimed by the Islamic State extremist group. Spanish authorities say the cell has been fully dismantled, its members dead or under arrest, but they are still working to piece together how exactly the attacks coalesced.

"It wasn't an attack planned by the central command of Daesh," Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido recently said, using another name for the Islamic State group in an interview with the ABC newspaper. "But it has been guided from overseas."

A Spanish official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss the ongoing probe said the Spanish cell communicated only face to face, never online.

The weekend before the attacks, several of the cell's members made the nine-hour drive to the Paris suburb of Malakoff for an overnight stay. They bought a camera before leaving again in an Audi A3. Investigators in both countries are focusing on what the group needed in France that it couldn't learn online, from one another or their imam.

Zoido, Spain's interior minister, said the probe into the international links has opened new investigative strands into the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, "but also into other events that could be related."

Malakoff has a history of jihadi ties, dating from January 2015 when an Islamic State extremist shot a police officer to death there before attacking a kosher supermarket later the same week. In November 2015, a surviving member of the Islamic State cell that attacked Paris trekked across the city to a metro station less than a mile away, ditching a fake suicide belt and calling on friends to come pick him up.

Four days after the cell members' return from Paris, on Aug. 16, Es Satty himself made a fatal mistake in his bomb-making workshop, frustrating the group's initial plan to strike Barcelona's tourism and religious monuments.

The attacks were carried out the next day by Es Satty's recruits, aged 17 to 28. One rammed a van into Barcelona's busy Las Ramblas boulevard. Hours later five of them armed with knives, an axe and fake explosive belts drove the Audi onto a beach promenade in Cambrils, south along the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona.

A real explosives belt, complete with a detonator, was found along with Es Satty's remains. A survivor of the blast said the imam planned to blow himself up and take as many victims as possible with him. However, near Es Satty's battered wallet were discount airline tickets to Belgium. It wasn't clear what he planned to do next.

Es Satty's first run-in with authorities in Spain dates from 2002 when he was arrested in the northern Africa enclave of Ceuta for using a forged passport to smuggle in a fellow Moroccan. The judge gave him a six-month suspended prison sentence. Because he stayed out of trouble for at least two years, he avoided prison.

He moved in with an older relative named Mustapha who lived in central Vilanova i la Geltru, a coastal town 30 miles south of Barcelona where he started preaching. His name resurfaced as part of two separate investigations linked to the 2004 al-Qaida bombings of Madrid commuter trains.

Zoido said last week that judicial police and the investigating judge "never found any sign that pointed at the radicalization of [Abdelbaki] Es Satty." Mustapha was acquitted, and Spain's top court threw out sentences against the rest of the cell, ruling that wiretaps of them were illegal, evidence was inconclusive, and some confessions were extracted under duress.

Then on the imam's 37th birthday in 2009, a drug-sniffing dog found 266 pounds of hashish in Es Satty's car as he was about to board a ferry. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

While jailed in the same prison as one of the participants in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, Es Satty took part in a program for inmates "vulnerable for recruitment or radicalization," Spain's Interior Ministry said. In 2015, skirting an expulsion order for the drug conviction, he was freed for good and made his way to Ripoll, at the time a town in need of an imam.

At some point in late 2015, the town's Muslim community had split into two congregations and Es Satty lost his job. He disappeared to Belgium, looking for work as an imam in Vilvoorde, a town south of Brussels that was losing young men to the war zone in Iraq and Syria.

Without using Europol channels to exchange country-to-country information, police agents in Belgium and Spain exchanged emails about Es Satty, officials in both countries have acknowledged.

Spain's Catalan regional police replied saying the imam was free of any suspicion, failing to pass on information relating to past offenses that was only in the hands of the central government in Madrid.

The clogged information flow provided an opportunity for Es Satty to leave Vilvoorde unnoticed as soon as a criminal records certificate was requested.

After he returned to Ripoll, he went to work at the new mosque, an unmarked storefront near the train station and within walking distance of his flat in the city center.

He lasted less than a year before leaving the job in June.

By then, he had gathered around him three sets of brothers, including the siblings whose Audi A3 was seen coming and going from the house in Alcanar where Es Satty would ultimately die.

A Section on 09/05/2017

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