TABLET MAG
by Jonathan Zalman
May 4, 2015

Jihadist terrorist cell, a recruiter for Islamic State, planned bombing, beheading before arrests on April 8

Last month, Spanish police arrested 11 Islamist extremists who were operating at 17 locations across the country’s northeastern region of Catalonia. After a year-long investigation, police detained ten men and one woman, aged 17 to 45, who were all “assumed to be implicated in diverse crimes related to jihadist terrorism, especially linked to Islamic State,” Reuters reported. Today, The Wall Street Journal confirmed those suspicions by reporting that the extremists, called the Islamic Fraternity for the Preaching of Jihad, had planned to destroy a Jewish bookstore in Barcelona:  The cell, which featured prominent roles for converts to Islam, tried to recruit fighters to join Islamic State in Syria and developed plans to bomb a Jewish bookstore in Barcelona and snatch and behead a captive, according to police and prosecutors in court documents. READ MORE