Ten ISIS terrorists who planned to attack the police, banks and Jewish people in Barcelona are jailed
Ten members of an ISIS-linked cell who planned to launch terror attacks in Barcelona have been jailed in Spain’s National Court today.
Five Moroccans, four Spaniards and a Brazilian, calling themselves the ‘Islamic Fraternity, Group for preaching jihad’ were handed between eight and 12 years in jail.
The group, based in Terrassa, near Barcelona, had planned attacks against ‘police, banks or Jewish institutions’ and also expressed desires to join ISIS and film a jihadist execution video.
The ten men were sentenced to jail in the National Court for ‘belonging to a terrorist organisation’, documents said.
The three leaders of the group were given 12 years in jail while the seven others got eight years.
In March 2015, the main leader of the cell, a Spaniard who had converted to Islam, proposed to kidnap and decapitate an ‘infidel’ whom he had already identified, film the killing and then broadcast the video online before fleeing to Syria.
He had previously proposed that the group ‘commit an attack against the Catalan parliament, which no one had objected to,’ according to the court ruling.
‘He also justified decapitations and talked about making handmade bombs to commit attacks.’
Police found documents calling for jihad at his home and books on European organisations such as the Basque separatist group ETA or Germany’s far-left Red Army Faction, the ruling said.
Members of the cell had also gone on a recce in Barcelona, the Catalonian capital, where they took photos of the train station, a luxury seaside hotel, a shopping mall and a police station.
One member went to Syria in April 2014 and died in Fallujah in Iraq the following year.
Three others tried to follow in his footsteps at the end of 2014 but were detained at the border between Bulgaria and Turkey.
According to the interior ministry, close to a third of all arrests for ‘jihadist terrorism’ in Spain were made in Catalonia last year.
Source: Daily Mail
