They Shoot Down The Alleged Perpetrator Of The Attack In Barcelona

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

After an intense search, the Catalan police managed to kill this Monday the most wanted man in Europe, Younes Abouyaaquob, identified as the material author of the bloody attack on the Ramblas in Barcelona, authorities reported.

The young man was located in a rural municipality of Subirats, about 50 kilometers south of Barcelona, thanks to citizen collaboration, which allowed a Mossos d'Esquadra patrol to intercept him in a vineyard where he was trying to hide.

Upon discovery, always according to the police version, the suspect opened his shirt and revealed what looked like an explosive belt while shouting "Allah akbar" (God is great, in Arabic), to which the agents they responded with their firearms.

The suspect was hit by gunfire, which killed him. After examining the body, the explosives experts of the police determined that the explosives belt was false, reported in a press conference the greatest of the Mossos d'Esquadra Josep Lluís Trapero.

The authorities assure that it was Abouyaaquob who was driving the white van that last Thursday fatally ran over 13 people on the Ramblas in Barcelona and injured more than a hundred.

He is also credited with the murder of a young man, Pau Pérez, whom he stabbed to steal his car, after fleeing on foot through the city after leaving the van in the middle of the Ramblas and crossing the Boquería market. With that stolen car, a police control was skipped, in which he wounded an agent, and fled, until today.

His whereabouts were unknown until this morning, Spanish time, when a couple of Mossos agents saw a young man who seemed to be the suspect, whose photo had been distributed throughout the country. Soon after, a Subirats neighbor called the police to alert the presence of a suspicious man.

With the death of Abouyaaquob, the 12-member terrorist cell to which the Mossos attributed the attack in Barcelona and the one in Cambrils, where five alleged terrorists were killed after they killed a woman, is completely dismantled.

Two others died in the explosion last Wednesday from a house in which they were apparently making explosives, and the rest are detained, said Major Trapero, who warned that the investigation is still open.

In total, the number of fatalities of both attacks amounts to 15, of multiple nationalities. 48 wounded are still hospitalized, of which eight are still in critical condition.