4 surviving members of terror cell suspected of Catalonia attacks in court
BARCELONA. KAIZNFORM Four men detained on suspicion of having taken part in terror attacks in Catalonia that left a tally of 15 dead and more than 100 wounded have appeared before a judge at Spain's National Court on Monday, EFE reports.
The four, who are allegedly the remaining members of a terror cell once believed to have contained 12 participants, were due to testify before Judge Fernando Andreu and Prosecutor Ana Noé at a fortified court in downtown Madrid that was built to try terrorism cases in Spain.
Idris Oukabir was the first of the suspects to be arrested. He was nabbed shortly after the attack in Barcelona's Rambla Boulevard on Thursday afternoon because his name appeared in documents linked to the rental of a van used by the cell.
When police picked him up, he claimed his brother Moussa Oukabir, 17, had stolen his identity documents.
Hours later, at around 1 am, Moussa died with four other terror suspects, shot by police after perpetrating an attack at the coastal town of Cambrils that cost the life of one pedestrian.
The second detainee, who was nabbed on Thursday night, was Mohamed Houli Shemlal, 21, a native of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa.
Shemlal was seriously injured in an explosion that rocked a beach-side house in Alcanar, where the cell had been planning attacks for months, police have said. He arrived at the Madrid court dressed in pajamas, having been arrested shortly after he was released from the hospital where he was taken after the explosion.
The other two suspects were arrested on Friday. Mohamed Aallaa, 27, was dragged out of a house in Ripoll after his brother, Said Aallaa, had been shot dead in Cambrils.
The other suspect is Salah al-Karib, 34, who runs a cyber-café and whom police have linked to Idris Oukabir.
According to police, the four suspects were all alleged members of the 12-man cell that carried out the attacks.
According to investigators, five members were killed in Cambrils, at least two perished in Wednesday's explosion when a makeshift bomb factory the cell had been using to build an arsenal accidentally detonated in the Alcanar house.
The last one, Younes Abouyaaqoub, hijacked a car to flee the attack scene in Barcelona's Rambla.
His escape triggered a massive manhunt that ended Monday when he was gunned down in a wine-making country west of Barcelona while wearing a fake bomb vest.
He was being hunted as the main suspect in the terror plot after he had driven a van at high speed down a pedestrianized section of the Rambla, killing 13.
He then stabbed the owner of a car he hijacked to escape.