Homeland Security News

The police chief for Spain's Catalonia region says the extremist cell suspected of carrying out last week's fatal van attacks has been broken now that the 12 members authorities had identified are all accounted for.

Regional police chief Josep Luis Trapero made the assessment after two of his officers shot and killed the one suspect who was thought to still be at large on Monday.  Trapero says four of the men responsible for the attacks that left 15 dead are under arrest.

He says another eight are dead themselves: five who were shot dead by police in the resort town of Cambrils and two others who were killed when a house exploded the night before the Barcelona attack.

Trapero says an imam was one of the suspects who died in the explosion.

Read more: ABC News

Police outside Barcelona shot down a man wearing a possible explosives vest, the regional police force said Monday, as the manhunt intensified for the fugitive in the city's van attack.

Regional police said officers shot a man wearing a possible explosives belt in Subirats, a small town 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of Barcelona, while investigating a "suspicious person" there. A bomb disposal robot was dispatched to approach the suspect, Catalan police said.

La Vanguardia newspaper reported that the man shot was Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, who has been the target of an international manhunt since Thursday's van attack in Barcelona.

Authorities said Monday they now have evidence that Abouyaaqoub drove the van that plowed down the city's famed Las Ramblas promenade, killing 13 pedestrians and injuring more than 120 others.

They said Abouyaaqoub, who was born in Morocco and has Spanish residency, also is suspected of carjacking a man and stabbing him to death as he made his getaway, raising the death toll between the Barcelona attack and a related attack hours later to 15.

Read more: AP

The U.S.-led NATO alliance says it isn’t adequately prepared for urban combat and is asking defense contractors for help in reshaping its fighting forces.  The allies see capability gaps in close-quarters warfare, where enemies can create confusion as they mingle with large populations, according to a contract proposal posted by NATO’s Norfolk, Va.-based transformation headquarters.

“NATO is not sufficiently organized, trained, or equipped to comprehensively understand and execute precise operations across the maritime, cyberspace, land, air, space dimensions/domains” in densely populated coastal cities, stated the bid proposal, which closed Monday.  “(It) is a matter of when, not if, the military will be required to operate in urban environments,” NATO’s urbanization project team stated.

Army chief Gen. Mark Milley has also spoken frequently in recent months about pivoting from a force structure largely designed around wars to be fought on the plains of northern Europe and deserts of the Middle East.

Read more: Stars and Stripes

Spanish police on Monday extended the search for the man who killed 13 people in Barcelona by ramming a van into crowds to all of Europe as details emerged of how he fled on foot through the streets of the old town before disappearing.

Authorities are looking for Younes Abouyaaqoub, a 22-year-old Moroccan-born man, who they believe was behind the wheel of a van which left a trail of dead and injured on Barcelona's famed boulevard.

The Catalan regional government said all European police forces were now searching for Abouyaaqoub and authorities could not rule out that he had slipped across the border into France.

"This person is no longer just being sought in Catalonia but in all European countries, this is an effort by European police," Joaquim Forn, in charge of home affairs in the northeastern Spanish region, told Catalan radio.

Forn confirmed that police were now almost certain Abouyaaqoub was the driver.

Read more:  Reuters

Dozens of so-called Islamic State (IS) militants are reported to have been killed in a Russian air strike near the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zour.

Russia's defence ministry said at least 200 jihadists had died after its air force targeted a convoy of about 20 4x4s, armoured vehicles and tanks.

It did not say when the strike took place, but a monitoring group reported that a convoy had been hit last Friday.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 70.

The activist-run Deir Ezzor 24 news network also said there had been a strike on a convoy outside Deir al-Zour on Friday that killed a number of militants.

IS has been besieging Syrian government-controlled areas of the city since 2015, leaving some 90,000 civilians dependent on air drops of aid organised by the UN.

Russia, which launched a military campaign in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad two years ago, has been bombing IS positions along the frontline in Deir al-Zour in an attempt to stop the government enclave falling to the jihadist group.

Read more:  BBC News