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By mid morning this long boulevard would normally be crammed with tourists, but instead just a few people wandered its length, some laying out candles to commemorate the victims.
Thursday’s afternoon’s shocking attack by a white delivery van represents the latest use of a vehicle in a terrorist attack against civilians, mimicking incidents in Berlin, London, Stockholm and the French city of Nice over the past year. The attack was claimed by the extremist Islamic State group.
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 pedestrations in the early hours of the morning are connected, said the Catalan region’s top security official, Interior Minister Joaquim Forn to local radio on Friday, though he gave no details.
The initial attack broke the peace of a warm summer afternoon in a packed, tourist-friendly area of Barcelona at the peak of vacation season, and the victims came from well beyond the city’s borders.
More than a hundred people from at least 24 nationalities were hurt and the death toll could rise, said Forn, a measure of the international draw of the cosmopolitan Las Ramblas area, which has long stood at the heart of the city. France’s Foreign Ministry said 26 of its citizens were among the injured, including 11 seriously.
Josep Lluís Trapero, 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, 60 miles southwest of Barcelona, 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 of his injuries. Six others were injured, including a police officer, Forn told local radio.
Amateur video aired by Spain’s state TVE broadcaster 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.
Spain had been spared a large-scale terrorist attack since the 2004 bombing of the Madrid rail system that killed 192 people and injured about 2,000, but authorities had long braced for another hit. The attack Thursday brought to Spain the same sort of vehicular carnage that has visited Britain, France, Germany and Sweden since 2016, and highlighted the difficulty of defending dense city centers from violence that requires no explosives or training.
“Terrorists will never defeat a united people who love freedom in the face of barbarism,” Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy wrote via Twitter as he rushed to Barcelona.
The Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency said that “the people who executed the Barcelona attack are soldiers from the Islamic State and they did this operation as a response to calls to target coalition states.” Spain is a member of a broad U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State.
It was not immediately clear how closely the Islamic State had worked with the attackers. The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks inspired by its rhetoric but not directly planned by Islamic State leaders.
Police later said they were looking into a potential link between the van attack and a pair of explosions that destroyed a house in Alcanar, about 100 miles southeast of Barcelona, earlier in the day. One person was killed there and 16 were injured, including police officers and firefighters who were investigating the initial blast. The blast at the house, which apparently contained propane canisters, was initially reported to be a gas explosion.
The connection was not fully explained, but it raised the question of whether the attackers were attempting to use gas canisters in Las Ramblas to cause even more casualties.
The Las Ramblas attack, which took place over a few terror-filled minutes just before 5 p.m. local time, set off a wave of panic and confusion as authorities sought to track down the perpetrators, and fearful people hid for hours in barricaded shops, restaurants and churches.
Witnesses described chaos as the white delivery van suddenly swung off a street and onto the wide pedestrian mall that draws tourists and residents to its bars, cafes and shops. As people started to run, the driver swerved the vehicle from side to side, in an apparent effort to inflict more damage.
When the van came to a halt, its front was smashed and crumpled inward from the bodies it had hit. People were sprawled on the sidewalk, some not moving. Hats, handbags and other items were strewn about.
“All of sudden, everyone started running, so we ran, too,” Andrew Roby, 35, who was visiting from Washington, said in a phone interview. Roby said he saw several people, apparently wounded, lying in front of and beside the van.
“We saw people on the ground,” he said. “I heard a bunch of people screaming.”
Some locals expressed frustration at authorities’ failure to place barricades at the entrances to the boulevard in a new era of vehicular terrorism. Las Ramblas is one of the city’s top tourist areas, with a wide pedestrian promenade flanked by roadways.
One British tourist said she hid beneath the counters of a phone shop with 20 other people for half an hour.
“We heard gunshots, and people were running and screaming,” said Mandy Wood, 54.
“By the grace of God, we could have been here two minutes earlier,” she said. “We would have been on the street where it happened.”
Another witness said police suddenly told the crowd to run.
“There was a really loud kind of crashing noise. I didn’t stop to look back,” Ethan Spieby, a witness caught up in the commotion, told the BBC.
Hours after the attack, he said he was holed up in a church with about 80 tourists and locals.
“They have locked the doors, and I think the police are outside. We’re just waiting in here right now to hear more news. It’s quite scary to be caught up in it,” he said.
More than four hours after the attack, police started evacuating those who were hiding in nearby buildings.
Underlining the confusion after the attack, police found the identification card of one local resident in the cab of the van and spent hours searching for him. After his name was widely circulated in local media, he turned himself in to police and said that he had lost his identification card, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.
And adding to the sense of unease, the Catalan Interior Ministry said late Thursday that a car broke through a police checkpoint outside Barcelona and injured two officers. It was not immediately clear whether the incident, which took place near the town of Sant Just Desvern, just west of Barcelona, was connected to the attack.
Spanish police did not immediately give details about the driver or the incident.
After the attack, Spanish authorities shared the names of at least two people with European and Arab intelligence agencies, but the suspects did not appear to have been flagged for connections to extremism, according to an Arab and a European intelligence official, neither of whom was authorized to speak on the record.
Authorities appear to think that a small group of two or three people planned the attack, the Arab intelligence official said.
Islamic State supporters celebrated the Barcelona attack Thursday and promoted previous threats made against Spain, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has called on supporters to carry out attacks using vehicles. The group has claimed responsibility for car attacks in Europe, as well as at Ohio State University last year.
After the attack Thursday, offers of assistance flooded in from around the world, including the United States.
“The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!” President Trump wrote via Twitter.
Later in the day, Vice President Pence said that the United States would punish the perpetrators.
“Whoever is responsible should know that the United States of America, together with our allies, will find and punish those responsible, and drive the evil of radical Islamic terror from the face of the Earth,” he told reporters in Panama City, where he is wrapping up a tour of Latin America.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said U.S. authorities will offer to help in any way they can.
The Catalonia region of Spain has faced repeated terrorist attacks over decades from the ETA Basque separatist group.
In July 2016, a truck was driven into Bastille Day crowds along a seaside corniche in the southern French city of Nice, killing 86 people. In December 2016, 12 people were killed when a driver used a hijacked truck to drive into a Christmas market in Berlin.
In March, a man in a rented sport-utility vehicle plowed into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing four people before he ran onto the grounds of Parliament and fatally stabbed a police officer. A month later in Stockholm, a rejected asylum-seeker from Uzbekistan crashed a truck into a central department store in an attack that killed five people.
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