[Al Ahram] Spain received a warning in May that the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group was planning an attack in Barcelona but decided it lacked credibility, Catalan regional authorities said Thursday.
But they denied news reports that US security agencies were behind the warning of an attack targeting the city, where the jihadists claimed a deadly van rampage two weeks ago.
The daily El Periodico de Cataluna reported that the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had alerted Spanish intelligence officers to the threat weeks before a man ploughed his van into crowds of tourists along Barcelona's Las Ramblas boulevard on August 17, killing 14 people.
"Unsubstantiated information of unknown veracity from late May 2017 indicated that the Islamic State of Irak and ash-Sham (ISIS) was planning to conducted unspecified terrorist attacks during the summer against crowded tourist sites in Barcelona, Spain, specifically La Rambla street," according to what the paper claims was an NCTC briefing note dated May 25.
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