Van attack kills at least 13 in Barcelona

TERROR STRIKES BARCELONA — TWICE:

-- “One of Europe’s top tourist destinations shuddered under coordinated terrorist attacks when a van drove down Barcelona’s iconic Las Ramblas promenade, killing at least 13 … while police shot dead five men in car also attacking pedestrians several hours later outside the city,” James McAuley, Michael Birnbaum and Paul Schemm report. The attacks were claimed by the Islamic State and are the worst to hit Spain in more than a decade. “The Las Ramblas carnage and the killing by police of five suspects in the nearby seaside resort of Cambrils as they tried to mow down pedestrians in the early hours of the morning are connected, said Catalan region’s top security official ... [A senior] Catalan police official told reporters that two men were arrested in connection with the attack, a Moroccan national and a Spanish citizen from the enclave of Melilla. The driver is still thought to be at large, he said. A third suspect was arrested in the northern Catalan town of Ripoli.”

“It was around 1 a.m. on Friday that police responded to an attack near the boardwalk of the beach town of Cambrils … where an Audi had plowed into a crowd. The police exchanged fire with the men in the car, killing four immediately while a fifth later died … Six others, [including a police officer], were injured 

… Amateur video [from the attack] showed several police cars speeding along what appeared to be a seafront boulevard as people screamed, followed by a brief volley of about 10 bullets. A second video showed three bodies on the ground in front of the town’s yacht club. Authorities carried out controlled detonations of what they thought were explosive belts worn by the men, but turned out to be well made fakes.”

“Whitney Cohn, a mathematics teacher from Montebello, N.Y., was walking along [Barcelona's Las Ramblas] with her husband and two daughters … when the van came careening through the crowd, throwing people aside like dolls as screams pierced the air,” the New York Times’s Anne Sophie Bolon and James C. McKinley Jr. report: “She grabbed her daughters and started running. ‘It was flying,’ Ms. Cohn said ... ‘The van missed us by a sec.”

“A national police official … said at least three vans had been rented under [one suspect’s] name,” the Times reports. “As night fell, the Barcelona police were frantically searching for the two other vans, combing the streets and underground parking garages … [And] a counterterrorism expert, who was briefed on the details of the investigation, said late Thursday night that the police now believed the plotinitially involved the use of explosives and a large truck. ‘Part of the plan was they tried to rent a larger truck, but they didn’t have the right permit and so they ended up getting’ smaller vans, said the expert …”

People react in the area where a van crashed into pedestrians at Las Ramblas Street in Barcelona. (Sergio Perez/Reuters)

-- Trump, who waited two days to assign blame in the Charlottesville attack because he likes to “have all the facts,” responded to the terrorist attack in Barcelona by instructing his 36 million Twitter followers to study a highly discredited story about killing terrorists with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Trump said. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” “The story has been found to be unsubstantiated by numerous fact-checkers in the media,”David Nakamura reports: “But Trump first told the story during a campaign rally in February 2016, as he defended his position of supporting methods of torture, such as waterboarding, on terrorist suspects. Trump also tweeted messages of support for the victims, in which he said the United States ‘condemns the terror attack.’” That stands in sharp contrast to Trump's reaction Saturday to the protests in Charlottesville.