Four Spain attack suspects in court for questioning

MADRID - Agence France-Presse

The four remaining alleged members of a terror cell that carried out deadly twin attacks in Spain arrived in a Madrid court on Aug. 22 where they will be grilled by a judge, after eight other suspects were killed.

Under heavy security, police vans entered the National Court, which deals with terrorism cases, where a judge will decide what -- if any -- charges to press against them over the vehicle attacks that left 15 dead and 120 injured.

On Aug. 21, Spanish police shot dead Barcelona terror suspect Younes Abouyaaqoub, in a dramatic end to a massive manhunt for the Moroccan national who was wearing a fake suicide belt and shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) when he was killed.

The Moroccan was the last remaining member of a 12-man cell suspected of plotting last week's deadly vehicle rampages in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils that were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Four men were detained, and the rest were killed, either by police or in an explosion believed to have been accidentally detonated by the suspects themselves in their bomb factory in the seaside town of Alcanar.

Among those killed in the explosion was a Moroccan imam at the heart of the cell, Abdelbaki Es Satty, Catalan police chief Josep Lluis Trapero confirmed Aug. 21. 

Four days after the van rampage on the tourist-packed Las Ramblas boulevard, police on Aug. 21 gunned down the 22-year-old Abouyaaqoub in the village about 60 kilometres west of Barcelona, after receiving multiple tip-offs.

In Abouyaaqoub's hometown Ripoll, where many of the suspects grew up or lived, Moroccan factory worker Hassan Azzidi said he was "happy and sad all at once" that the suspect had been gunned down.

Investigators seeking to unravel the terror cell had homed in on the small border town of Ripoll at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in northeastern Spain.

Satty, aged in his 40s, came under scrutiny as he is believed to have radicalised youths in Ripoll.

Police said the imam had spent time in prison and had once been in contact with a suspect wanted on terrorism charges but was never himself charged with terror-related incidents.

In Belgium, the mayor of the Vilvorde region told AFP that Satty spent time in the Brussels suburb of Machelen -- next to the city's airport -- between January and March 2016.

In the Moroccan town of M'rirt, relatives of Abouyaaqoub have accused the imam of radicalising the young man as well as his brother Houssein.

"Over the last two years, Younes and Houssein began to radicalise under the influence of this imam," their grandfather told AFP.