Secret services and police not aware of terrorist movements before 2017 attacks, says new report

According to Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia, neither the Spanish intelligence services nor the police were aware of the terrorists’ movements prior to the August 2017 attacks on Barcelona’s La Rambla and in Cambrils.

The report states that what transpired was pieced together afterwards by Catalan Mossos police force.

The newspaper contradicts Público’s version of the events that was recently published in installments detailing how the mastermind behind the attacks, Abdelbaki Es Satty, had allegedly been a secret services informant that had been assisted in becoming Ripoll’s imam in exchange for avoiding deportation and how the secret services had been tracking the terrorists right up to the attacks.

La Vanguardia says that it was the Catalan Mossos police force that reconstructed the events that took place days after they had happened, not beforehand, mainly from the cell phones that were confiscated after the attack and also maintains that the phones had never been tapped.

One of these phones, in particular, is said to have contained a significant amount of information that allowed investigators to map out the terrorists' prior actions.

The newspaper claims that the terrorists’ steps before the attacks – including a trip to Paris that two of them took – were also reconstructed after the events by taking into account receipts, parking payments, tolls, and bank statements with help from the Spanish and French secret services.