In the house where he lived with his mother and an eight-year-old sister, the agents found various products – sulfuric acid, acetone and etching – that can be used to prepare explosive substances, as well as gunpowder. The parent has also been questioned to clarify if she knew about her son’s activities, since he had the products visible in the home, and if she could have acquired part of them.
During the search, the agents also found an ax and notes on the production of explosive substances, as well as a vest that terrorists usually use to blow themselves up. This is the sixth arrest of a minor in Spain in the last four months for alleged jihadist activities.
The investigation that led to the arrest of the minor began in October, when the patrolling that anti-terrorist experts carry out on the Internet in search of Islamist indoctrinators detected that, through his profiles on social networks, the minor was allegedly proselytizing. of jihad. The investigations into him revealed a high degree of radicalization that, in recent weeks, had supposedly become more pronounced. In fact, the Police planned to arrest him in the middle of this week.
However, the monitoring to which the minor was subjected made it possible to observe how, last Sunday, he left his home with a backpack and headed to an open field. Once there, he was observed detonating small amounts of explosive in what agents interpreted as evidence of the explosive substances he was handling. The fact that he also sent a message stating that this Monday was going to be “the day” made the agents fear that the young man could try to commit an attack imminently. The young man is scheduled to testify this Tuesday at the National Court.
The town of Montellano experienced moments of concern and some chaos on Sunday afternoon when its neighbors saw the deployment of the operation by the agents who blocked several streets in the center. The nervousness forced the City Council to issue a statement on social networks calling for calm and stating that the National Police had informed them that there was “no risk for the population”, although the investigation would continue “in the next few hours”, due to which was made “a call for tranquility.”
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The mayor of the municipality, Curro Gil, confirmed this morning that the family was perfectly integrated into the municipality. An impression shared by the owner of a haberdashery shop near the house where they lived and of which the detainee’s mother, who had set up a sewing shop, was a regular customer. “They had impeccable behavior. We knew all three of them,” he says in a telephone conversation.
Classes at the institute where the minor attended were not suspended this Monday and, in fact, the director told the families this Sunday that the school day was going to run normally, the councilor noted, although it is true that Many kids have not gone to the center this Monday. The young man detained was enrolled as a repeater in the 3rd year of ESO, indicate the sources consulted. Last year he was temporarily expelled for bringing a knife to school.
There are now six young people who, since last November, have been detained in Spain for alleged jihadist activities, including the one now arrested. The first were two teenagers arrested in Palma de Mallorca and Plasencia (Cáceres), who are accused of spreading radical Islamist proclamations on video game channels frequented by young people. In December, three other minors were arrested (two in the province of Madrid and another in Barcelona) between the ages of 15 and 16, as alleged perpetrators of the crimes of self-indoctrination and terrorist glorification for having used a digital platform to spread messages in which They advocated and justified the use of violence against non-Muslims.
homemade explosive
They also had their manuals seized to make triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a powerful homemade explosive known as mother of satan. This It is the substance that had been manufactured in large quantities by the jihadist cell that committed the August 2017 attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils and whose accidental explosion killed three of its members. Before the arrest of these five minors, the Civil Guard had arrested a woman of Spanish nationality in Vitoria in September for indoctrinating the four of her in the ideology of jihadist terrorism.
In 2022, there was only one minor arrested for these crimes, a 15-year-old teenager in whose possession a large amount of Islamic State propaganda material was found, including videos of attacks and manuals on how to make explosives. The young man, who had begun consuming jihadist material at the age of 12, was sentenced for self-indoctrination to remain in a closed juvenile center until he came of age, and then was placed on probation.
The radicalization of minors has become an important concern in the fight against terrorism. The study Jihadism and jihadists in Spain: 15 years after 11-M, published in 2019 by the Elcano Royal Institute, there was already an “increase” in jihadists who had begun their radicalization process at an early age. According to the report, Islamists who had become fanatical as minors accounted for 17% of those arrested and killed in Spain between 2001 and 2011; a percentage that rose to 25.9% in the period between 2012 and 2017. In this sense, the authors of the analysis specified that in 2012, “a special interest in the indoctrination and recruitment of children and adolescents by of jihadist radicalization agents active in Spain.”
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