SUBIRATS: Spanish police on Monday shot dead Younes Abouyaaqoub, the suspected driver of a van that mowed down pedestrians in Barcelona, after a massive manhunt for the Moroccan national who was wearing what appeared to be a suicide belt when he was killed.

“We confirm that the person shot down in the incident in Subirats (near Barcelona) is Younes Abouyaaqoub, the perpetrator of the terrorist attack in Barcelona,” police in Catalonia tweeted.

Four days after his van rampage on the tourist-packed Las Ramblas boulevard, police took down the 22-year-old in the village about 60 kilometres west of Barcelona.

Police said their operation on a winding road between two vineyards was ongoing as they were trying to determine if there were other suspects involved in the devastating twin attacks that claimed 15 lives last week.

They had removed the apparent suicide belt from Abouyaaqoub’s body but had yet to confirm if it was real or fake.

Roser Ventura, who works at a nearby vineyard, said she saw around 20 police cars drive by with sirens wailing while helicopters rattled overhead, as she heard the news about the shot man on the radio.

Arnau Gomez, who lives about a kilometre away from where the suspect was shot, described the village of 300 people as being an ideal hideout as “it is far from everything”.

“In the hills there are many homes of seasonal workers, it’s easy to hide,” he said.

Earlier on Monday, police had launched an appeal for information about the fugitive described as dangerous and likely armed, believed to be the last remaining member of a 12-man cell suspected of plotting last week’s deadly attacks.

The other suspects have been killed by police or detained after the vehicle rampages in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils. The militant Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for the assaults, believed to be its first in Spain.

Authorities on Monday raised the death toll to 15, confirming that Pau Perez, a 34-year-old man found stabbed to death in a Ford Focus outside Barcelona on Friday, was killed by Abouyaaqoub.

The police had fired at the car as it forced its way through a checkpoint shortly after the Barcelona carnage, and later found Perez in the vehicle.

Investigators believe the victim was the owner of the car, which was hijacked by Abouyaaqoub to make his getaway.

Describing Abouyaaqoub as around 1.8 metres tall, police tweeted four photographs of the man with short black hair, including three pictures in which he was wearing a black and white striped T-shirt.

Investigators seeking to unravel the terror cell had homed in on the small border town of Ripoll at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains. Several suspects including Abouyaaqoub grew up or lived in the town.

Moroccan imam Abdelbaki Es Satty, aged in his 40s, has also come under scrutiny as he is believed to have radicalised youths in Ripoll.

Police raided more homes in Ripoll on Monday, Catalonia’s regional interior minister Joaquim Forn said.

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 said that Satty spent time in the Brussels suburb of Machelen — next to the city’s airport — between January and March 2016.

On the other side of Brussels, the Molenbeek suburb has gained notoriety as a hotbed of international jihadists after the Brussels bombings in March 2016 and the Paris attacks in November 2015.

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 said.

A neighbour close to the Abouyaaqoub family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the imam “had recruited Moroccans of Ripoll and planned the attacks”.

But Ali Assid, president of the Annour Islamic community that runs the Ripoll mosque where Satty was preaching, said the imam “never sent a radical message, all he preached was really Islam. If he is behind all that, there he must be showing us one face in the mosque and showing another face outside.”

The imam has been missing since Tuesday. On Saturday, police raided his apartment. They have raised the possibility that he died in an explosion on Wednesday evening at a house believed to be the suspects’ bomb factory, where police uncovered a massive cache of 120 gas canisters.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2017