Some of the suspects, who were travelling in an Audi A3, wore what appeared to be explosive belts, but they were later found to be fake. The attack came hours after a van mowed down shoppers and tourists in Barcelona’s famous Las Ramblas district, killing 13 and wounding about 100.
Friday’s attack in Cambrils, where six bystanders and a policeman were also wounded, ended a day of bloody violence along the Catalan coast, which the police said was the work of a terrorist cell determined to “kill as many people as possible”.
Video footage from Cambrils, 120km from Barcelona, showed three bodies lying on the ground in the town’s port. The police urged residents to stay indoors and later carried out controlled blasts on suspected explosive devices, amid reports the suspects had been wearing suicide vests or belts.
Part of the cell is thought to have blown itself up in the early hours of Thursday morning while trying to assemble a bomb in a house in another coastal town, Alcanar Platja, some 200km south along the coast from Barcelona. One person was killed and another wounded in an initial explosion that destroyed the house. Police and firefighters who came to the scene were wounded by a second blast.
The Alcanar explosions were initially reported to have been caused by gas cylinders. The alleged link with a terrorist cell was revealed by the police only after the devastating Barcelona attack.
At 5pm on Thursday a white Fiat van veered off the road and into a crowd on to the pedestrian section of Las Ramblas, the popular and celebrated Barcelona thoroughfare. The van drove through people, sending pedestrians and cyclists flying through the air for 500 metres before stopping over a mosaic by the artist Joan MirĆ³. Of the 100 victims injured in the Barcelona attack, 15 were said to be in serious condition.
The driver fled on foot and was pursued by police. Streets and parking garages were also combed for other vans thought to have been rented by the suspected terror group.
By Friday morning, police said they had made three arrests – one in Alcanar and two in the town of Ripoll – but it was not clear whether any of those detained was the driver of the van. Catalan authorities have declared three days of mourning and a minute’s silence is to be held in Barcelona’s PlaƧa de Catalunya at midday on Friday.
According to Spain’s El Mundo newspaper, postmortem examinations have already been carried out on the bodies of the 13 people who died in Barcelona. DNA samples have also been taken and dental examinations will follow.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, boasting on a website that: “Terror is filling the crusaders’ hearts in the Land of Andalusia.” The Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said the whole country country stood in solidarity with Barcelona, blaming “jihadi terrorism”.
Javier Zaragoza, the chief prosecutor of the Audiencia Nacional, which deals with terrorism cases, said the attackers did not appear to have previous links to jihadism.
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