The Spanish National Court and the Prosecutor's Office have refused the requests made by the victims of the 2017 Barcelona attacks. Their lawyer alleges that the mastermind of the La Rambla attacks, a Moroccan imam called Abdelbaki Es Satty, had links with the Spanish intelligence services. Almost three years after it was confirmed that he had died in an accidental explosion in Alcanar, a Spanish municipality, Moroccan imam Abdelbaki Es Satty is still at the heart of a case that involves Spain's National Intelligence Services (CNI). The Spanish intelligence services are trying, by all means, to conceal the secret collaboration with the former drug-trafficking convict, who, once released in 2014, became an «imam of Ripoll» and recruited fighters for Daesh. To prove this, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, a former House of Representatives member, and the lawyer of the father of a three-year-old child who died in the 2017 Barcelona attacks, is trying everything he can. Es Satty and his alleged links with CNI In court, the aforementioned allegations were fiercely fought back. Last week, the judges refused the requests submitted by Alonso-Cuevillas, who wanted the guards of the Castellon prison, where Es Satty served his sentence, and CNI agents who met with the imam several times to be summoned and heard in court. The judges concluded that the request was unnecessary and that getting the CNI involved and looking at its reports on the imam is an unimportant procedure, El Pais reports. Faced with this rejection, Monday, September 23, the lawyer Alonso-Cuevillas appealed against the decisions of the judge and the Attorney General, Diario16 wrote. According to Spanish daily Ok Diario, three Moroccan detainees, Driss Oukabir, Mohammed Houli Chemlal and Said Ben Iazza, who are involved in the case, will be heard in October. The same newspaper revealed, in November 2017, that Abdelbaki Es Satty is a long-time «collaborator» of the National Intelligence Center. The Spanish media stated that this «collaboration» started when the Moroccan national was detained in the Castellon prison in Spain. This cooperation allowed him to remain in the country after being convicted for drug trafficking in 2014. Moreover, he managed to receive a residence card in April 2015 instead of being deported to Morocco. Providing CNI agents with information on jihadists in Spain, Ripoll's self-proclaimed «imam» created his own network away from the «nosy eyes» of the Catalan police, sending recruits to reinforce Daesh's troops in the Iraqi-Syrian front.
