Recently Spain witnessed a chain of terror attacks. On Thursday terrorists drove a van into a pedestrians which killed at-least 13 people and injured 100 more at La Rambla in Barcelona. On Wednesday an explosion took place in the town of Alcanar which destroyed a building, killing a man. Later on Thursday the police killed 5 terrorists in Cambrils who attacked pedestrians with an axe and knife. The Spanish Prime Minister openly called it a Jihadi attack.
Such form of crude terror attacks have now become rampant in Europe in the past 13 months and have killed about 130 people in France, Germany, Britain, Sweden and Spain.
Now as news keeps coming out about the attack, the father of the two dead Spanish terrorists named Said Aallaa and Youssef Aallaa who were killed in Cambrils and at an explosion at a bomb factory in Alcanar respectively has claimed that their minds were poisoned by a radical Imam. According to the report, the father pinned the blame on the Imam named Abdelbaki Es Satty who preached for two years at a mosque in Ripoll where incidentally 11 of the 12 attackers lived.
The report claimed that the Imam Es Satty, whose mosque was raided by the police, was linked to the Al-Qaeda and was also connected to the terrorists responsible for the 2004 Madrid train bombings. One local shop owner in the area claimed that families had become more hardlined ever since the Imam had arrived in town. This increased orthodoxy included young women starting to wear the Hijab even though they had never done so before. Families of the other attackers too acknowledged that there was a spike in religiousness of their wards. The imam in question incidentally vanished from the town last week but is believed to have died in that explosion in Alcanar and is believed to have masterminded the whole attack.
According to latest reports, the Imam had gone to jail in the past for smuggling drugs between Spain and Morocco. For this crime he was ordered to return to Morocco but when he left jail in 2014 he won an appeal against the deportation. There he had argued that his International rights would have been breached by the order. He then sought asylum later that year due to which he was allowed free movement in 26 European states.
This Spanish attacks weren’t the lone instance of terror and they were closely followed by attacks in Finland and Russia.
On Friday at about 4 PM the Finnish town of Turku experienced a knife attack where the armed assailant had resulted in the death of 2 women and injuries to 8 people. This attack was soon suspected to be an act of terror and a journalist also claimed that the attacker was shouting “God is great” in Arabic. The police apprehended a certain Abderrahman Mechkah who is a 18 year old Asylum seeker from Morocco, in connection with the crime.
Russia too was not spared from such an attack. On Saturday, 7-8 people were injured in a knife attack at the Siberian city of Surgut. According to the report, local police claimed to have shot down the attacker and the responsibility for the same was taken by the Islamic State.