A Spanish cop shot dead a knife-wielding man who shouted “Allahu akbar!” as he targeted a police station near Barcelona in what authorities called a terrorist attack.
The assailant arrived at the police station in the town of Cornella de Llobregat at 5:45 a.m. and pressed the buzzer to be let inside, Catalan police official Rafel Comes told reporters.
After being let in, he pulled out a large knife and lunged at officers in “a clearly premeditated desire to kill an agent of our force,” Comes said, according to Agence France-Presse.
“The officer used her gun to save her own life,” he said, adding that the man shouted the Arabic phrase for “God is great,” as well as other words that officers did not understand.
“These are enough indication to treat the events being investigated as a terrorist attack,” he said.
The incident occurred just days after the one-year anniversary of a deadly jihadist rampage in Catalonia.
Sixteen people were killed Aug. 17 and 18, 2017, when a van drove into crowds on Barcelona’s popular Las Ramblas boulevard and in a knife attack in the nearby resort of Cambrils.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, Spain’s worst since the Madrid train bombings in 2004 when 191 people died and more than 1,800 were injured.
Younes Abouyaaqoub, the jihadist who carried out last year’s attack at Las Ramblas, was shot to death after a manhunt. Five other terrorists were killed by police in Cambrils.
But Comas stressed that authorities have found no evidence linking Monday’s attack to last year’s wave of terror.
Anti-terrorism police sources had earlier told AFP the suspect was a 29-year-old Algerian, but Comes said police still needed to confirm that the Algerian identity papers he carried with him were actually his.
Comes said investigators have found no criminal record for the man identified in the papers, though international police databases were being searched for matches with his fingerprints.
Explosives experts searched the man’s apartment, which was located just a few hundred yards from the site of the attack.
Teresa Cunillera, the central government’s representative in Catalonia, called for “prudence” before deciding what the man’s motive was and until police had finished their probe.
“Until there have been a minimum of checks, of looking into the whys, it is very difficult to draw any conclusions,” she told public radio.
Resident Conchi Garcia, 50, said the man came to the neighborhood two years ago, when he moved in with a woman and her two daughters who had always lived in the area.
“It was strange that the woman started wearing the veil shortly after he arrived,” Garcia told AFP.
Catalonia, which is home to a large number of second-generation North African immigrants, has had a long history of Islamic militant activity.
Spain’s first Muslim extremist — a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group — was uncovered in Catalonia in 1995.
One in four people detained in Spain in relation to Muslim-linked terrorism come from the Catalan province of Barcelona, according to a study published last year by the Real Instituto Elcano, a Spanish think-tank, which called the province the country’s “main center of jihadist activity.”
With Post wires
