The three alleged terrorists who helped in the preparation of the attacks of Barcelona and Cambrils in August of 2017, which left 16 people dead and 140 wounded, are each time closer to sit on the bench of the accused. After two and a half years of investigation, judge José Luis Calama issued this Tuesday, the car gives by closed the investigation and sent the case to the Third Section of the Sala de lo Penal of the Audiencia Nacional for trial. The three are currently in custody.
Calama attributed to two of the accused —Mohamed Houli and Driss Oukabir— the crime of integration in terrorist organization, havoc, and manufacturing and possession of explosives. The first was injured in the explosion of the house of Alcanar (Tarragona) on the day before the attack to the Catalan capital; and the second, a brother of one of the jihadists killed by the Mossos in Cambrils, he rented the van used for the trampling mass of The Rambla of Barcelona. Ben Iazza, a butcher of Castellón, is charged with a crime of collaboration, as it provided another van to the cell to purchase the explosive material with which they pretended to perform the attack.
This latest decision of the magistrate keeps the line of the order issued in October of 2018 by the investigating judge Fernando Andreu, who prosecuted the three suspects for collaborating and participating in the preparation of the attacks, but excluded from its material execution. This initiative, supported in its day by the office of the Prosecutor of the National Audience, it assumes that they have not been processed by the 16 crimes of murder that he was accused the prosecution also popular. The public ministry, and Andreu, considered that there was no evidence sufficient to attribute the perpetration of the attacks, as these are improvised after the explosion registered in the housing of Alcanar.
Despite this, the judge himself concluded that Houli, Oukabir and Ben Iazza constituted, with the other seven terrorists dead, a jihadist group from 2015. The cell, formed mostly by young people resident in the locality of Ripoll (Girona), acted under the spiritual direction of imam Abdelbaki Is Satty and conjured “to make one or more attacks of large dimensions, through the use of explosive devices, in order to contribute to the strategy” of the Islamic State, he wrote Andreu.
The own Houli, after his arrest in August of 2017, admitted his participation in the preparation of the attacks, admitted that he planned an attack higher with explosives and that the magnet of Ripoll, even, had raised the possibility of sacrifice themselves. According to the researchers, the jihadists came to make between 200 and 500 kilograms of explosives in Alcanar, also 19 improvised devices type hand grenade and a belt pump. Also acopiaron 104 bottles of butane and propane. “[With all of them, they were trying] to amplify the effect of the explosive, intending to increase the volume of shrapnel as the ability to create balls of fire generated”, stressed Andreu in their self-processing, where apostillaba: “Such a quantity of material for the manufacture of explosives and of such destructive power, get to be used to attack in places or monuments with great influx of public, as would be the goal of the terrorist cell under investigation, would have led to some damage of enormous dimensions”.
