Man who planned drone attack on Barcelona stadium sentenced to prison

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - A Spanish court sentenced a man whom the Daesh/ISIS terror group told to carry out a drone attack on Barcelona’s Camp Nou football stadium to three years behind bars on Monday.

Police arrested Mohammed Yassi Amrani in May 2020, during the depths of Spain’s strict COVID-19 lockdown.

Spain’s Interior Ministry said he was found consistently breaking the rules to travel around the city of Barcelona to look for targets.

Although the man was said to have had an “affinity” for the terror group for four years, investigators say his radicalization intensified during the confinement.

After calling for terrorist attacks in a March 2020 Facebook post, investigators say Amrani was contacted by a Daesh recruiter who eventually instructed him to bomb the Barcelona stadium during a football match between Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“It would involve using a drone with explosives attached … it would be elevated above the stadium … and during the match, it would be detonated,” the recruiter said, according to the Interior Ministry.

Spanish prosecutors, however, argued that the man would have most likely ended up attacking passersby on the street with a “cold weapon.”

Police said Amrani had copious amounts of terrorist material such as videos and manuals that explained how to make bombs.

“His acts make clear not only his goals of training himself to carry out attacks … but that he was prepared in every way to contribute to achieving the goals of Daesh,” prosecutors argued.

Prosecutors settled with Amrani’s defense to send him to jail for three years on charges of passive terrorist indoctrination.

Daesh was also behind the 2017 Barcelona attacks, in which a 22-year-old drove into pedestrians in La Rambla, killing 14 people and injuring around 130 others. Hours later, men from the same terrorist cell drove into pedestrians in the nearby town of Cambrils, killing one woman and injuring six.