Homeland Security News

The cell behind the Barcelona van attack had planned to use explosives against monuments including the city's famous Sagrada Familia church, a suspect has told a Madrid court. The group's plans were scaled back when a house packed with bomb-making equipment blew up the day before.
 
The Alcanar explosion came the day before Thursday's Barcelona attack in which a van was driven at speed down the main Las Ramblas boulevard, killing 13 and injuring more than 100. 

Two other suspects were killed in the Alcanar explosion, including Abdelbaki Es Satty, the Moroccan imam from the town of Ripoll thought to have been a radicalising influence on the suspects. 

Meanwhile, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb has confirmed previous reports that some of the attackers made an overnight visit to France days before. 

Read more: BBC News

Two of the four suspected members of an Islamist group which carried out the attacks in Catalonia last week that killed 15 told the judge a local imam was the instigator of the plot, a source familiar with the matter said. 

Abdelbaki Es Satty, a former imam in the town of Ripoll where most of the members of the cell were from, died in a blast at a house the night before a van plowed into crowds in Barcelona as the group was preparing explosives to launch a larger attack. 

Source: Reuters

Four alleged members of a terror cell accused of killing 15 people in attacks in Barcelona and a nearby resort appeared in court Tuesday, a day after the last missing member of the cell was gunned down by police.

Mohamed Houli Chemlal, a 21 year-old arrested after he survived an explosion at a house in eastern Spain last week, was the first to testify before National Court Judge Fernando Andreu in Madrid. Andreu will decide whether the four should be jailed or released.

Chemlal's testimony is considered key to understanding the motivations of the 12-man cell that killed 15 people and wounded over 120 in the two vehicle attacks. He is the lone survivor of a blast Wednesday that destroyed a house in Alcanar, south of Barcelona, where police believe the cell was preparing explosives for an even bigger attack on the city. Over 100 tanks of butane gas and materials to make TATP explosive were found at the house, police say.

Suspect Driss Oukabir was arrested Thursday in the northeastern town of Ripoll, as were two others identified by Spanish media as Mohammed Aalla and Salh el Karib. Police have not yet confirmed the last two names. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for both attacks.

The lone fugitive from the cell - 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub - was shot to death Monday after he flashed what turned out to be a fake suicide belt at two police who confronted him in a vineyard not far from the city he terrorized.

Read more: AP

Islamic State militants, driven from their main stronghold in northern Iraq, are trapped in a military vise that will squeeze them on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said.

Mattis arrived in the Iraqi capital Tuesday, hours after President Donald Trump outlined a fresh approach to the stalemated war in Afghanistan. Trump also has pledged to take a more aggressive, effective approach against IS in Iraq and Syria, but he has yet to announce a strategy for that conflict that differs greatly from his predecessor’s.

In Baghdad, Mattis was meeting with Iraqi government leaders and U.S. commanders. He planned to meet in Irbil with Massoud Barzani, leader of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region that has helped fight IS.

Mattis told reporters before he left neighboring Jordan that the Middle Euphrates River Valley — roughly from the western Iraqi city of al-Qaim to the eastern Syrian city of Der el-Zour — will be liberated in time, as IS takes hit from both ends of the valley that bisects Iraq and Syria.

“You see, ISIS is now caught in-between converging forces,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the militant group that burst into western and northern Iraq in 2014 from Syria and held sway for more than two years. “So ISIS’s days are certainly numbered, but it’s not over yet and it’s not going to be over any time soon.”

Mattis referred to this area as “ISIS’s last stand.”

Read more:  AP

Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria have sent out four times as many child suicide bombers this year as they used in all of 2016, the United Nations Children's Fund said on Tuesday.

Eighty-three children had been used as bombers since Jan. 1, 2017, UNICEF said. Of those, 55 were girls, mostly under 15 years old and 27 were boys. One was a baby strapped to a girl. Nineteen children were used last year, UNICEF said.

The Boko Haram insurgency, now in its eighth year, has claimed over 20,000 lives and forced more than two million people to flee their homes over eight years.

The frequency of suicide bomb attacks in northeastern Nigeria has increased in the past few weeks, killing at least 170 people since June 1, according to a Reuters tally.

UNICEF, in a statement released on Tuesday, said it was "extremely concerned about an appalling increase in the cruel and calculated use of children, especially girls, as 'human bombs' in northeast Nigeria. The use of children in this way is an atrocity".

Read more:  Reuters