Barcelona terror gang planned to murder thousands of people using explosive known as the Mother of Satan

The Barcelona terror gang planned to murder thousands of people using an explosive known as the Mother of Satan.

It is thought they intended to simultaneously detonate bombs in vans at three locations in the Spanish city.

Targets included the Sagrada Familia church, a Unesco World Heritage Site, which is one of the most visited attractions in Europe.

The other two locations were the port area of the city and the Ramblas, where a van was deliberately driven into crowds on Thursday afternoon, killing 13 and injuring 130.

Police are working on the theory the cell was forced to abort the truck bombs plan when their explosives factory in Alcanar, 120 miles from Barcelona, blew up accidentally on Wednesday.

Josep Lluis Trapero, the chief of Catalonia’s police, said: “They were preparing one or several attacks in Barcelona – an explosion in Alcanar stopped this as they no longer had the material they needed to commit attacks of an even bigger scope.”

Unable to carry out the planned bombings, the gang is thought to have gone to Plan B.

After the van was driven into pedestrians in the Ramblas, an Audi A3 ploughed into a crowd in the early hours of Friday in the resort of Cambrils.

Seven people were injured in this second attack, one of whom later died.

The occupants of the car had been wearing fake suicide vests and had knives and an axe. Four of the five were shot dead by police at the scene.

Acetone peroxide – also called TATP and nicknamed Mother of Satan because of the high number of accidental explosions it causes – was found in the wreckage of the house that was used as the bomb factory.

TATP was used in the 7/7 bombings in London as well as the attacks in Paris in November 2015.

Shoe bomber Richard Reid tried but failed to detonate a TATP bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.

It emerged yesterday that police believe a preacher was blown up during the botched attempt to carry out the van bombings.

Police were examining DNA to see if the body of imam Abdelbaki Es Satty is in the debris of the house that was blown to bits in Alcanar on Wednesday, local reports said.

The 40-year-old’s home in Ripoll – where six of the terror plotters lived – was raided by armed officers in the early hours yesterday.

Officers spent three hours inside his flat, 65 miles from the scene of the atrocity in the Ramblas.

Es Satty was subletting a room in the flat to another man, who told police the preacher left on Tuesday apparently heading to Morocco, where he has a wife and children.

The flatmate said he had heard nothing from the imam since then.

Es Satty’s associates, who meet at the Esperanza cafe in Ripoll, said he left his post in the town a month ago, saying he had another job.

They added it was around the same time that 17-year-old Moussa Oukabir – among the five attackers shot dead in Cambrils – left the area. One of the associates said: “It is a shock to all of us. We know their parents. They are good kids. The imam said he had another job, so we don’t know what to think. He wasn’t radical.

“We thought he was just going somewhere different. We haven’t seen Moussa since then either.”

Ripoll mosque president Ali Yassine told how the Moroccan dad-of-nine left his job as imam after he asked for a three-month holiday and a pay rise.

He added: “I cannot be responsible for what happens outside here. If I had known this was happening, I would have gone to the police. Islam is peace.

“What happened in Barcelona is against everything Islam stands for.”

He said police went to the mosque and officials gave all the information they had about Es Satty to officers.

More than 20 butane gas canisters were also found in the debris of the bomb factory. It was originally reported that one person died in the explosion. But officers have revealed there may be another body in the rubble of the house in Alcanar.

Catalonia’s police force said: “We are working to determine if remains at Alcanar are a second corpse.”

They added: “We are working to determine if biological traces from Alcanar are human.”

Police sources told Spanish media that Es Satty followed the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam. Detectives were believed to be investigating claims he had radicalised and led the terror cell of young men who planned and carried out the shocking atrocity on Thursday afternoon.

Officers are convinced that had the butane-filled gas containers not accidentally detonated the night before the murders on Thursday, the 12-person terror cell would have used them to inflict a much higher death toll in the tourist hot spots of Barcelona.