They were brothers and boyhood friends from a town with no unfamiliar faces. They were linked by Moroccan roots and equally tied by their upbringings in Ripoll, an ancient hub in the Catalan foothills known for its monastery and passageways dotted with cafes and kebab shops.
But most recently, police believe, the young men were drawn together by an imam and an alleged plot to murder on a massive scale – an extraordinary secret for 12 people to keep for months on end.
In the suspected extremist cell’s final days, the group accumulated more than 100 gas canisters, blew up a house in a botched effort to make bombs, drove a van through Barcelona’s storied Las Ramblas promenade, and attacked beachside tourists, Spanish authorities said.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 14 people and left scores wounded. Five of the dozen were shot dead by police.
Now, Ripoll is cut off by police roadblocks as the search for an alleged cell member thought to still be on the run continues.
“We don’t know whether to cry and mourn them or what to do,” said Wafa Marsi, who knew the attackers and stood with their weeping mothers as they clustered in small groups in the town square.
What the families finally did, after fiercely debating the issue, was denounce the attack, some holding up homemade signs reading “Not in our name.”
Police have identified 12 members of the cell, but three remained unaccounted for Sunday. Two are believed to have been killed when the house where the plot was hatched exploded Wednesday, Catalan police official Josep Lluis Trapero told reporters Sunday.
Complicating the manhunt for the suspected fugitive and any other possible accomplices, though, was the fact that police so far have been unable to pinpoint who remained at large. The explosion in Alcanar, 186 miles south of Ripoll, nearly obliterated the bomb makers along with the house. A police official has said the imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, is thought to be one of them.
Trapero declined to confirm that Younes Abouyaaquoub, a 22-year-old Moroccan, was the one at large and the suspected driver of the van that plowed down the Las Ramblas promenade Thursday, killing 13 people and injuring 120. Another attack hours later killed one person and injured others in Cambrils, a seaside town south of the city.
Police are investigating whether a man found stabbed to death inside a car in Barcelona may have been killed by an attacker as well. They believe the cell members had planned to fill the vans with explosives and create a massive attack in the Catalan capital. The plot was foiled when the house in Alcanar blew up Wednesday night.
None of the 12 had any known history of violent extremism, Spanish police have said.
Trapero confirmed the imam was part of the investigation, but said police had no solid evidence that he was responsible for radicalizing the young men in the cell. Es Satty in June abruptly quit working at a mosque in Ripoll and has not been seen since.
“In fact, even though there is an imam implicated in the group, it doesn’t mean that the mosque is where they were radicalized,” Trapero said.
One woman who was close to multiple attackers and who heard Es Satty’s sermons said the imam repeatedly preached about jihad and killing infidels. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing she would be attacked for speaking out.
“I feel like I could have done something. I feel a little bit guilty now,” she said. “Everybody knew it. It was an open secret.”
Es Satty’s former mosque denounced the deadly attacks, but denied Es Satty was anything other than “a normal imam.”
Catalonia itself has become increasingly known as a center of extremism and for tensions within the Muslim community on how to handle it. Nearly one-third of the arrests in Spain for alleged links to the Islamic State group were made in Catalonia, according to an analysis last year by Fernano Reinares of the Royal Institute Elcano, a Spanish think tank.
When Es Satty returned to Ripoll, he again landed a job as imam – this time at the new mosque. But at the beginning of the summer, Es Satty announced he wanted a three-month vacation.
Ripoll resident Marsi, as well others who spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity, admitted tensions brewed at times between the two mosques, although Marsi pointed out that the differences were not over religious content.
“I can’t vouch for anybody else, but I can guarantee 100 percent that there was zero radicalization in either mosque. If the imam had said something about jihad, the people of Ripoll would have ousted him. The women, in particular, are raging right now,” Marsi emphasized.