Questions remain over 17-A attacks

Five months on from the Barcelona and Cambrils terror attacks, it is still not understood how the man behind the massacre could have been an informer to the National Intelligence Centre (CNI). Did the Spanish secret services receive international alerts warning that the Ripoll imam matched the profile of a potential terrorist and reject them? Did they have this information and not share it with the Mossos d’Esquadra due to inertia, error or for any specific reason? Did the CNI know he was dangerous but let him act in order to find out who was pulling the strings? Or are the conspiracy theorists right that there was a state operation underway which ignored him for political reasons? Despite the many unknowns, there is complete certainty about the outcome: 16 people lost their lives and many question marks remain over whether the massacre could have been avoided or, at least, things made less easy for Abdelbaki Es Satty, the imam who radicalised the group of young men who committed the attacks.

It took the CNI three months to admit that the imam was an informer, and then only because it was uncovered by the media. For Jofre Montoto, a security expert in jihadism, “It’s clear that we don’t know many things but we do know for sure that if the CNI knew who he was and he was being monitored, then it is a mistake on the part of the intelligence services”.

Journalist Benjamin Paret recently published an article on the attacks claiming that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services, investigated the imam and determined that “his patterns of activity coincided with those of an imminent terrorist attack.” According to the reporter, they warned the CNI, but neither it nor the Spanish government responded.