The Barcelona 'Pretenders'

I've sat and looked over the terror attack of the past week in Barcelona and it's loaded with material for a remarkable five-star movie script.

All of the players are Moroccan in nature, but grew up in a small village in the region (Ripoll).  Ten thousand residents are said to live there......roughly 700 of them are said to be Muslims.  Most everyone in the town agrees....integration was a common thing, and they didn't have radicals.  Then, one day, the religious instructor for the local mosque got changed out.  Of this guy, the description by Spanish journalists....."proper" and " discreet".  The proper term likely means that he attended to the various jobs of an Islamic instructor. For the term discreet?  This can have various meanings.  My guess is that the guy never got into sharing gossip or insider-info.

What few ever realized about the instructor (from Morocco)...was that he was radicalized and recruiting.  What is laid out.....the instructor came up in June and said he had to go back to Morocco and attend to personal business.  Then he kinda disappears.  But for the record, he simply was staying in a home which was being converted over to becoming a bomb-factory.

Spanish journalists report that they had 120 propane gas canisters laid out. The imam and the 'boys' (six of them) were going to create one of the biggest terror episodes in European history.  Just in wounded aspects, you could be talking about two to three thousand people injured, and dozens dead.

But....they screwed up. None of these idiots really knew that much over lp gas canisters, and some explosion occurred at the house.  From the video I saw....there just isn't much left of the building....just blocks laying around.  The imam?  Dead in the middle of this, but it would take days to realize who he was and what was going on.

So the boys went to plan B.....just do something.  So they rented a van, and proceeded to mow-down people on a busy shopping street.  Cops stopped the van but the driver got away.  Then they went looking for the six.  Five would be found and they engaged in a brief attempt with the cops.....with the cops shooting them all.  The sixth guy?  The driver?  He was found two days ago.  Shot dead as well.  The odd factor?  All of them had fake suicide vests on. Yes, fake.  My guess is that the vests were made up and the imam would have loaded them at the appropriate time with the explosives but he never got around to it.

Six young guys dead.  The imam dead.  All of these events set into motion by juvenile handling of lp canisters and trying to make them into bombs.  Questions still linger.  How did they acquire the 120 lp gas canisters without drawing attention?  Who paid for them?  Who recommended the imam for this 'assignment'?

The sad thing is virtually everyone....from the locals to the Moroccan community in this little village....consider the young guys to be 'good-boys'.  Over and over, it's uttered by just about everyone.  No one suggests they were ever on some path to violent death.  If the explosion hadn't occurred at the house with the lp gas canisters?  That's the part of the story which interests me.....it would have been some massive terror attack. It's stopped only because of mishandling of the canisters.