2 of 4 suspects in Spain carnage held without bail

A police officer takes a dog through the entrance of a telephone call center Tuesday in Ripoll in the Pyrenees region of Spain where the suspected driver of the van used to mow down pedestrians Thursday in Barcelona was shot and killed by police Monday.
A police officer takes a dog through the entrance of a telephone call center Tuesday in Ripoll in the Pyrenees region of Spain where the suspected driver of the van used to mow down pedestrians Thursday in Barcelona was shot and killed by police Monday.

MADRID -- A judge ordered two of the four surviving suspects in the extremist attacks in Spain held without bail, another detained for 72 more hours and one freed with restrictions Tuesday after the men appeared in court to answer questions about the events that killed 15 people.

National Court Judge Fernando Andreu issued his orders after quizzing the four about the vehicle attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, as well as about the fatal explosion at a bomb-making workshop that police said scuttled the group's plot to carry out a more deadly attack at unspecified Barcelona monuments.

The judge said there was enough evidence to hold Mohamed Houli Chemlal, 21, and Driss Oukabir, 28, on preliminary charges of causing homicides and injuries of a terrorist nature and of belonging to a terrorism organization. Houli Chemlal has an additional charge of dealing with explosives.

However, the judge ruled the evidence was "not solid enough" to keep holding Mohamed Aalla, who was freed on the conditions he appear in court weekly, relinquish his passport and not leave Spain.

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As for the owner of a cybercafe in Ripoll, the Pyrenees hometown to most of the 12 men originally identified as being members of the extremist cell behind the attacks, he will remain in custody for at least 72 more hours while police inquiries continue, the judge said.

The questioning the four men underwent during their initial court appearances provided new details of the scope of the cell's activities and the events leading up to the attacks in and around Barcelona last Thursday and Friday.

Two of the suspects identified a Ripoll imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, as the ideological leader of the group, according to a judicial official who heard Tuesday's interrogations. One said the bombs were being made to target a Barcelona monument where the imam planned to blow himself up as well, the court official said.

Instead, Es Satty and another man accidentally blew themselves up while preparing explosives in the home workshop in Alcanar, a coastal town south of Barcelona, police have said. The Alcanar house contained 120 tanks for propane gas, alongside residue of a bomb-making material known as TATP and remote-controlled detonators.

The court official was not authorized to speak about ongoing cases and requested anonymity.

Five others were shot dead by police during the vehicle and knife attack in Cambrils. Another, the suspected driver of the van that mowed down pedestrians in Barcelona's Las Ramblas promenade, was shot and killed in a vineyard not far from the city on Monday.

Houli Chemlal, the only survivor of the Alcanar blast, told the court that he was alive because he was on the ground floor of the house washing dishes after dinner. He testified from a wheelchair without lifting his eyes up from the ground, according to the court official.

Oukabir testified that he rented the vans used in the attacks but thought they were going to be used for a house move. His brother was one of the five men shot dead Friday by police in Cambrils.

According to another person who attended Tuesday's hearings, Oukabir said he initially lied out of fear and told police that his brother had stolen his ID to rent the vehicles. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the hearing.

Aalla, who said an Audi A3 used in the attack in Cambrils was registered under his name but used by a sibling, had one brother killed in Cambrils and another who is believed to be the second casualty of the Alcanar house blast.

Ripoll cybercafe owner Sahl El Karib told the judge that he was only trying to make a profit when he bought at least two airplane tickets for two alleged members of the cell. Police raided the cybercafe Tuesday, as well as a farmhouse in another town, searching for more evidence.

The lone fugitive from the cell -- 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub -- was shot to death Monday west of Barcelona after a dayslong manhunt. Police said he flashed what turned out to be a fake suicide belt at two officers who confronted him in a vineyard.

The judge's document said Abouyaaqoub drove the van that barreled through the Las Ramblas promenade, zigzagging to hit as many people as possible.

Abouyaaqoub's brother and friends and the imam made up the rest of the extremist cell. Police said that with Abouyaaqoub's death, the group's members were all dead or in custody.

Houli Chemlal was born in Melilla, one of Spain's two North African coastal enclaves that have borders with Morocco. Spanish media outlets say the other members are all Moroccans who lived in Spain.

CRITICISM OF POLICE

Officials fended off criticism of the police force after it was learned that Es Satty had a criminal past and had given confusing or incorrect details in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

After the explosion in Alcanar, for example, police and firefighters did not suspect that a terrorist cell was making bombs. They thought that thieves were dealing in stolen propane tanks -- or that perhaps drug dealers were manufacturing methamphetamine.

Catalan officials said their investigation was swift and successful, and Josep Lluis Trapero, chief of the Catalan national police, said it was dirty politics to place blame on police instead of the terrorists.

Es Satty spent four years in prison -- from 2010 to 2014 -- for smuggling hashish into Spain, and a counterterrorism officer who requested anonymity said the imam had a pending deportation order.

The director of the mosque where Es Satty preached and taught children Arabic and the Koran said they passed his name to police as a part of Spain's program to monitor the mosques.

A Spanish police adviser noted that Es Satty's name appeared, but just once, on page 70 of a Justice Ministry report on the arrests of five men in a town south of Barcelona, on charges of recruiting young people to fight in Iraq.

The president of the Catalan region, Carles Puigdemont, brushed aside criticism of the local forces, saying now was not the time to air grievances between Catalonia and the national government in Madrid.

Puigdemont said information about a suspicious imam "was not in the hands of the Catalan police."

The president added that forces in the region have been denied membership in Europol, which coordinates Europe's response to transnational terrorism, as well as Spain's anti-terror center.

"Information reaches us now through the Spanish police, but we do not yet have our own intelligence agency, we don't have it," he said.

Puigdemont said there are 200,000 Moroccan immigrants living in Catalonia.

"If 200,000 people were radicalized, we'd have a very serious problem, but they aren't all radical. They are our neighbor and therefore, the Catalan society, which is very diverse, is working well."

Counterterrorism officials last year issued an alert warning that Spain was consistently mentioned in propaganda material produced by the Islamic State extremist group, which claimed its soldiers were behind the attacks. In 2004, bombings on the Madrid rail system killed 192 people and injured about 2,000. Spanish officials blamed an al-Qaida cell.

Information for this article was contributed by Ciaran Giles and Aritz Parra of The Associated Press; and by William Booth, Souad Mekhennet, Raul Gallego Abellan and Angel Garcia of The Washington Post.

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AP

Four men arrested in the investigation of a terror cell that killed 15 people in attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Spain, leave a Civil Guard base Tuesday on the outskirts of Madrid for a court appearance. Two of them were ordered held without bail. One was held for 72 more hours, and the fourth was freed under order to appear in court weekly, stay in Spain and surrender his passport.

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AP/SANTI PALACIOS

A policeman hugs a boy and his family that he helped during the terrorist attack, at a memorial to the victims on Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain, on Monday.

A Section on 08/23/2017

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