Belgium gave “informal” tip to Catalan police about imam

A Belgian policeman told a Catalan colleague in 2016 that the imam believed to be the instigator of last week’s attack in Barcelona was suspicious, but no information was found then to link him to Islamist militancy, a source told Reuters.

Police in the northeast Spanish region of Catalonia are coming under growing criticism over the van attack that killed 13 people. Two others were killed during the driver’s getaway and in a separate attack further down the coast.

Several Spanish media accused Catalan police on Thursday of failing to properly investigate the Moroccan imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty. Meanwhile a wider blame game is being played out between central authorities in Madrid and officials in Catalonia, whose leaders are pushing for independence from Spain.

Spanish High Court judge Fernando Andreu on Thursday released, on certain conditions, another of the four suspects arrested over the attacks, a court order said.

Salh El Karib ran an internet cafe in the northeastern Spanish town of Ripoll where most members of the Islamist cell, who were mostly young men of Moroccan descent, lived.

Andreu on Tuesday ordered two suspects jailed while another was freed with conditions.

The other eight known members of the group were killed by police or died in an explosion.

Andreu met high-ranking security officials on Wednesday to set out a common strategy for the probe, a judicial source said.

The source said the meeting was a first step towards integrating the two Spanish police forces – the Civil Guard and the National Police – in the investigation, which had until now been exclusively managed by the Catalan police.

Andreu was due to take a formal decision on this later on Thursday, the source added.

TIP-OFF

The tip-off about the imam was made informally between two police officials from Belgium and Catalonia who knew each other, a source in Catalonia’s regional government said.

“The communication between the two policemen was not official. They knew each other because they had met in a police seminar,” the source said, on condition of anonymity.

Police records, however, had turned up nothing on the cleric. “The documents show that we had no information about the imam,” the source said, adding that the only official communication channels of the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, with police in other countries were through Spain’s central government.

The Catalan regional government and Spain’s central government declined to comment.

It remains unclear whether Catalan police made their own attempts to follow up the lead.

The top home affairs official in the Catalan regional government, Joaquim Forn, said on Thursday that Catalan authorities had been unaware of any investigation of the imam or that he could pose a threat, Spanish news agency EFE said.

Es Satty spent around three months in the Belgian town of Vilvoorde, a known centre of Islamist radicalism, between January and March last year.

He later went to Catalonia to be the imam of the small town of Ripoll, where he is suspected of having recruited and radicalised most of the group which carried out last week’s attacks.

CHANCE MISSED?

Hans Bonte, mayor of Vilvoorde, said last week that Es Satty had been “intensely screened” by Belgian police at the time, and he had told Spanish police by email of his whereabouts.

El Pais newspaper quoted Bonte on Thursday as saying he had received a reply from police in Barcelona on March 8 last year. “They said the imam had no links to radical groups,” he said.

Sources close to the investigation told Reuters earlier this week the regional Catalan force may have missed an opportunity to uncover the plot because of procedural errors and a lack of communication among investigators.

The errors and miscommunication centred around a major blast on Aug. 16, the eve of the attack, at a house where it was later discovered that members of the Islamist group had been making explosives, the sources said. Catalan police say Es Satty and another man died in that blast.

Spain ordered Es Satty’s expulsion from the country after he served a four-year jail term for drug-trafficking but this was annulled by a court in 2015 after Es Satty appealed, court officials have said.

The judge at the time overturned the expulsion order partly because Es Satty had employment roots in Spain, which he said “shows his efforts to integrate in Spanish society”.

There was no information before the court at the time to link Es Satty to Islamist terrorism, the officials said.

Spain’s Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said on Thursday he did not expect the attacks to have any significant short-term impact on tourism, which accounts for about 11 percent of the Spanish economy.

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