Authorities in Spain and Morocco rounded up 14 suspected members of an Islamic State cell on Tuesday in a wide-ranging joint operation that saw one suspect detained near Madrid and the others taken into custody in several Moroccan cities.
Advertisement
“This operation shows the excellent cooperation between the Spanish and Moroccan security to deal with the jihadist terrorist threat, especially that which comes from the conflict zones”, Spain’s Ministry of Interior said in a statement.
“Those arrested formed part of a network whose main activity was to recruit and send foreign fighters to join the ranks of the terrorist organisation Daesh in regions of Syria and Iraq under its control”, it said, using the main Arabic acronym for the group.
Before Tuesday’s arrests, 47 people had been detained in terrorism-related investigations in Spain this year, compared with 36 in the whole of 2014, according to the Interior Ministry.
The arrests came just days after a heavily armed 25-year-old Moroccan man, who had lived in Spain, was apprehended following an attempted attack on a high-speed French train.
Morocco frequently announces the dismantling of ISIS recruitment cells, often based in the northern city of Fez and connected to other northern cities.
Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said last month that 126 people had left Spain to join the Islamic State group in recent years.
Advertisement
Of these he said 25 had been killed, 61 remained overseas, 25 are known to have returned, 15 were in prison and 10 were free.
