Spain attacker shot dead

Barcelona, August 22
The Spanish police on Monday shot dead a man they suspect was the Islamist militant who drove a van into a Barcelona crowd last week, killing 13 people.
Ending a five-day manhunt, th police tracked 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub to a rural area near Barcelona. They said they shot him after he held up what appeared to be an explosives belt.
The police gave few immediate details of the incident in Subirats, saying they had called in a bomb squad to approach the man’s body after gunning him down.
Abouyaaqoub had been on the run since Thursday evening, after he drove at high speed into throngs of people strolling along Barcelona’s most famous avenue, Las Ramblas, in Spain’s worst militant attack in over a decade.
Islamic State claimed responsibility and police believe the attack was planned by a dozen accomplices, including a brother and two first cousins of Moroccan-born bouyaaqoub.
“The suspect wore what appeared to be an explosive belt. He has been shot down,” police said in an official tweet. Local media said the man was spotted by a woman in the early afternoon and then fled through vineyards but police managed to find and shoot him on a road near a sewage treatment plant.
The scene unfolded about 40 km (25 miles) from the spot, close to the FC Barcelona soccer stadium on the outskirts of the city, where the police said Abouyaaqoub had abandoned a car he had commandeered during his escape.
The police said Abouyaaqoub first fled Las Ramblas on foot amid the chaos of the attack, then hijacked the car, stabbing the driver, 34-year-old Pau Perez, to death before crashing through a police checkpoint.
Abouyaaqoub had been the only one of 12 accomplices still at large. His mother, Hannou Ghanimi, had appealed for him to surrender, saying she would rather see him in prison than end up dead. Four people have been arrested so far in connection with the attacks: three Moroccans and a citizen of Spain’s North African enclave of Melilla. They are currently being taken to the high court in Madrid, which has jurisdiction over terrorism matters. Abouyaaqoub lived in Ripoll, a town north of Barcelona close to French border.
Islamic State also claimed responsibility for a separate deadly assault which erupted hours after the van attack in Cambrils. In Cambrils, a car crashed into passersby and its occupants got out and tried to stab people. Five suspects were shot by the police, while a Spanish woman died in the attack. In seven hours of violence that followed the van’s entry into the pedestrian boulevard of Las Ramblas on Thursday, attackers killed 15 people: 13 on Las Ramblas, the Cambrils victim and the man in the hijacked car.