Spanish police on Monday shot down a man who local media identified as the Islamist militant who drove a van into a Barcelona crowd last week, killing 15 people.
Police did not immediately give the man’s identity, saying only that he had appeared to be wearing an explosive belt in the “incident” in Subirats, a town near Barcelona.
They said only that a bomb squad was using a robot to approach the man’s body.
Some Spanish media, citing investigative sources, said police had shot dead 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub, on the run since Thursday when he drove at high speed into heavy crowds strolling along Barcelona’s most famous avenue, Las Ramblas.
It was Spain’s worst militant attack in over a decade, with Islamic State claiming responsibility.
“The suspect wore what appeared to be an explosive belt. He has been shot down,” police said in an official tweet that did not make it unequivocally clear that he had been killed.
Local media said the man was spotted by a woman in the early afternoon and then fled through vineyards but police managed to find and shoot him on a road near a sewage treatment plant.
Police had asked the rest of Europe to join the manhunt for the Moroccan-born man. They say he fled Las Ramblas on foot amid the chaos of the attack then hijacked a car, stabbing the driver to death, before crashing through a police checkpoint.
Abouyaaqoub had been the only one of 12 accomplices still at large. His mother, Hannou Ghanimi, had appealed for him to surrender, saying she would rather see him in prison than end up dead.
Authorities on Monday raised the death toll to 15, confirming that Pau Perez, a 34-year-old man found stabbed to death in a Ford Focus outside Barcelona on Friday, was killed by Abouyaaqoub.
The police had fired at the car as it forced its way through a checkpoint shortly after the Barcelona carnage, and later found Perez in the vehicle.
Four people have been arrested so far in connection with the attacks: three Moroccans and a citizen of Spain’s North African enclave of Melilla. They will be taken to the high court in Madrid, which has jurisdiction over terrorism matters.
Escape plan
Investigators said Younes Abouyaaqoub fled the scene of Thursday’s attack on foot and hijacked a car to escape.
Abouyaaqoub is alleged to have stabbed the owner of the car, Pau Perez, as he parked the vehicle, and drove off with his body inside the car.
