Elliotte Friedman retweeted this chain earlier. Sounds like things were close to being much worse.
Rukmini Callimachi @rcallimachi
1. Good morning all. Late last night, I got a call from a source briefed on the Barcelona inquiry. What I learned:
2. There were 3 related events: 1. An explosion in a house in Alcanar on Wed, the van attack in Barcelona Thurs and car attack in Cambrils
3. According to my source, police learned from rental car company that attackers had tried to rent a large truck. See ISIS' instructions:
4. Source briefed on investigation says they were foiled when the driver failed to produce the necessary permit to drive the large vehicle.
5. At that point, they decided to rent 2 smaller vans. Investigators then tied men to building in Alcanar that blew up Wed. Check out damage
6. That explosion had initially been dismissed as a gas leak. When they went back, they found house had been stocked with gas bottles
7. Investigators believe the attackers had a Plan A, a plan B and a Plan C.
8. Plan A was to load the large truck with explosives & ram it causing a catastrophic explosion. That failed bc they couldn't rent big truck
9. Plan B was to load 2 smaller vans with explosives. That failed too. They didn't know how to prep the explosive & blew up house instead
10. That brought them to Plan C which was to use 2 smaller cars to ram people, first on the Ramblas, and later in the town of Cambril
11. What I also learned came from the erudite Lorenzo Vidino of @gwupoe, who spent part of 2012 studying Salafists in Catalan
12. Lorenzo Vidino explained to me that the town of Cambrils where the attack happened is next to Salou. Both play a role in the 9/11 attack
13. It was in Salou that Mohamed Atta, the pilot of 1st plane to fly into the World Trade Center, had a key meeting with an al-Qaeda figure:
14. Here's the 2002 reporting of colleague Doug Frantz who traveled to the coastal villages to piece together 9/11:
https://t.co/s0zlhhNthE
15. Larger point that Lorenzo Vidino made to me is that coastal area south of Barcelona (Tarragona, Cambrils, Salou) is a hotbed of Salafism
16. Another connection: 1 of the worst losses Italy faced in Iraq was the 2003 bombing which killed 19 Italians:
17. The suicide bomber was a foreign fighter who hailed from Vilanova i la Geltru, another little town in same area:
18. Based on complexity of this plot, this appears to have been work of a network. Should give us pause when we next declare defeat of ISIS