Spain, Hungary hold 5 tied to IS – Paris attacks suspect says he isn’t ashamed

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MADRID, Jan 14, (Agencies): Five people with suspected links to Islamic State jihadists were arrested Friday in separate incidents in Spain and Hungary, with several weapons also being seized, authorities said. Spain’s interior ministry said police detained a Moroccan man with Dutch identity documents in the northwestern city of Figueras suspected of belonging to IS who recently returned to Spain from Turkey. The authorities are investigating whether his return “was motivated by a desire to carry out some sort of action in Europe,” the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said Spanish police were able to locate the man thanks to the help of Dutch authorities and of the intelligence services of several unnamed countries. “Investigators are currently trying to determine the degree of radicalization of the detainee, his possible links in Europe, the activities he has been carrying out for Daesh and what his purpose was since his arrival in Spain,” the statement said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

In a separate operation, police detained two Spanish men who were part of a group “that had reached a very high level of determination to carry out terrorist activities”. The group was “fully aligned with the strategy of the terrorist organisation Daesh,” the ministry said in a separate statement. Police seized a long gun and three knives during searches of six houses carried out as part of the operation in Ceuta, the tiny Spanish territory bordered by Morocco on one side and the Mediterranean Sea.

Spanish police have arrested 181 people accused of connections to Islamist militant groups since 2015 when Spain raised its terror alert level to four on a scale of five following deadly attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait. It is the highest alert level since Al- Qaeda-inspired bombers blew up four packed commuter trains and killed 191 people in Madrid on March 11, 2004. Spain has been mentioned on extremist websites as a possible attack target for historical reasons, given much of its territory was under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492.

The main suspect in the Paris attacks said he was “not ashamed” in a letter to a woman who has been writing to him in prison, according to extracts published in the French press Friday. Salah Abdeslam has refused to respond to questions from French judges about the November 13, 2015 attacks in which 130 people died at the hands of Islamic State group jihadists. But in correspondence with an anonymous woman published by the daily newspaper Liberation he appeared “talkative for the first time,” the paper said. “First of all, I’m not afraid of letting anything slip because I’m not ashamed of what I am — and then what worse could be said than what’s already been said,” Abdeslam wrote, according to the extract from his investigation file. “I’m writing to you without knowing how to start, I got all your letters and I don’t know whether I’ve enjoyed them or not, they definitely let me spend a bit of time in the outside world,” he continued. Abdeslam received messages from a number of correspondents but only replied to one woman, the newspaper wrote.

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