Several of the plotters allegedly behind last week’s twin terrorist attacks in Spain travelled to France earlier this month, according to the French interior minister, reports the Financial Times.
In the latest piece of evidence pointing to an international dimension to the terrorist cell, Gérard Collomb said on Tuesday that the Audi car used to run down pedestrians in the Spanish resort of Cambrils had been photographed speeding in the Paris region. Mr Collomb said in an interview on BFM-TV that the black Audi A3 was caught on camera in the Paris area.
"This group came to Paris but it was a quick arrival and departure,” he said. French daily Le Parisien earlier reported that the car had come through the Paris region about a week before the attacks. Mr Collomb added that the perpetrators of the Spanish attacks, which took place in Barcelona and Cambrils and left 15 people dead, were unknown to French police.
The revelations came as Catalan police investigate the links between the suspected mastermind of the attacks, a 40-year-old imam named Abdelbaki Es Satty, and extremist groups in Belgium, where Satty often travelled. The police are examining his previous connections with Belgium after Hans Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, a town just north of Brussels, said on Sunday that Satty had stayed there between January and March 2016.
That would have meant he was in Belgium just before the terror attacks at Brussels airport and a metro station in March last year, which together killed 32 people.
The Spanish authorities have been in contact with the Belgian police for information, according to the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office.
Meanwhile, four men arrested last week for their alleged involvement in the 12-man cell responsible for the Spanish attacks appeared before a judge in Spain's National Court in Madrid on Tuesday. The other eight are believed to have died.