Rabat - Spanish police arrested on Wednesday 11 people, including five Moroccans, in connection with terrorist group Islamic State (IS). They were planning to carry out attacks in the Catalonia region.
The Spanish authorities said that they conducted raids in Barcelona and Tarragona. The operation resulted in the arrest of 10 men and a woman aged between 17 and 45.
Five of them were Moroccans, five Spanish and one Paraguayan. The non-Moroccans are all Islam converts, said Catalonia's regional interior minister Ramon Espadaler.
The police said the members of the group are suspected to have links with "jihadist terrorism, and particularly to the Islamic State," news website the Local.es reported.
On March 31st, a Moroccan couple and their sons were arrested in Spain after they planned to join the ranks of extremist groups in Syria through Morocco.
According to Spanish authorities, about 100 from Spain are suspected of having joined extremist groups in the Middle East, mainly Syria and Iraq.
Espadaler said there were links between the newly-busted network and two other arrests made at the Bulgarian-Turkish border in December.
"The Jihadist phenomenon is a reality," he said. "It exists in our country, in our neighboring European countries and worldwide, but we also have police capable of detecting radicalization and of fighting this phenomenon."
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