The police believe that his level of radicalization made him a “high risk to national security.”
The National Police arrested a 36-year-old man in Badalona (Barcelona, population 226,000) early Tuesday morning. After compulsively consuming highly violent propaganda from the Islamic State (ISIS), he had reached a level of radicalization that made him “a high risk to national security,” the Ministry of the Interior reported Thursday. The detainee, a Moroccan national with legal residence in Spain, watched videos produced by this terrorist organization almost daily, many of them depicting executions, and gathered information on African countries where jihadism has gained traction in recent years , such as Somalia, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, according to sources familiar with the investigation. The judge of the National Court, Francisco de Jorge, has ordered his remand in custody on charges of self-indoctrination and active terrorist indoctrination.
The operation, dubbed Operation Saeris—a collaboration between the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and the US FBI—began a year and a half ago after agents from the General Information Commissioner’s Office (CGI) detected an internet user displaying “high activity” related to the search for propaganda produced by ISIS producers, one of the jihadist group’s main tools for recruiting new followers. From that moment on, surveillance of the suspect revealed that he adopted security measures to avoid detection of his online criminal activity, such as the use of a virtual private network (VPN), a tool that allows users to hide their IP addresses and encrypt data to maintain their anonymity.
According to sources close to the investigation, the detainee carried out the bulk of his alleged criminal activity from his home, where police seized several computer devices at the time of his arrest. Outwardly, however, he led a seemingly normal life. Although he had no known job at the time of his arrest, he had recently worked as an assistant at the Port of Barcelona. The investigation also revealed an unusual social life among suspected jihadists, as the detainee regularly used social media to contact men and women with whom he wanted to have sexual relations. The Islamic State’s radical interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law) condemns homosexuality and, in fact, provides for the death penalty for those who practice it. During the caliphate in Iraq and Syria, ISIS publicly executed several men for this act . In some cases, they were slaughtered with a knife, and in others, they were thrown from the top of buildings.
In the first six months of the year, the Security Forces had arrested 69 suspected jihadists in Spain , in addition to participating in the arrest of 11 more in other countries, according to the latest official report published on the Ministry of the Interior’s website. If this pace continues, the year could end with more than 100 arrests, figures not recorded since 2004, when the 11-M attacks took place and 131 suspected jihadists were arrested. This upward trend in the number of anti-jihadist operations began in October 2023, when the outbreak of war in Gaza following Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s military response forced Fernando Grande-Marlaska’s department to accelerate many of its ongoing investigations into suspected radical Islamist activities, fearing that the conflict would push them to commit attacks, according to police sources.
A report by the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), released on June 24, detailed that of the 289 arrests for jihadist terrorism recorded last year in 20 member states, the largest number (78) were made in Spain. Spain is on anti-terrorism alert level 4, “high risk” – in effect since June 2015 – out of the five existing levels.
