Mastermind Of Barcelona Attack Was Supposed To Be Deported – But Judges Blocked It

23 Aug, 2017 by Cassy Fiano

Print this article Font size -16+

Last week, a van was driven into a group of pedestrians on La Rambla in Barcelona, Spain. La Rambla is a busy street which serves as a pedestrian mall and is often crowded. In the attack, which ISIS later took credit for, 14 people were killed and well over 100 were injured. This was followed up by more terrorist attacks, bringing the death toll to 15. Now, the man who is believed to have masterminded the attack has been identified — and it turns out, he should have been deported.

Abdelbaki Es Satty, the imam who is thought to have engineered the attacks, was supposed to have been deported from Spain in 2014. But a judge blocked his deportation, saying it would have violated his human rights.

Satty had been convicted of drug smuggling and when his prison sentence concluded in April 2014, he was supposed to be removed from the country. But Satty launched a legal appeal, after which a judge agreed with him that deportation was a human rights violation. Pictures have now come to light of his alleged home in Morocco, filled with cannabis. There is a thriving drug trade between Morocco and Spain, which not only traffics drugs, but also arms and refugees. Law enforcement has said that this drug trade “has turned into warfare and we are losing.”

After Satty escaped deportation, he applied for asylum, which allowed him to travel through the European Union’s Schengen Zone, which has been described as “effectively an international passport-free zone for terrorists” by former Interpol chief Robert Noble. Satty traveled to Brussels, in Belgium, not long before a 2016 terrorist attack there.

Polish officials used the Barcelona attack to issue a warning, blaming Europe’s “weak” immigration policies for the influx of terrorists into the continent. “We are all shaken by the information that comes to us from Spain, and we share the pain of the families of the victims,” Deputy Defence Minister Michał Dworczyk said. “However, we cannot ignore the fact that we have a serious problem in Europe with the influx of illegal immigrants. It is a very bad idea to invite people who can not be controlled [and can] be said to pose a threat to EU citizens.”