This Monday marks the third anniversary of the bloody terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, an action for which a cell of the Islamic State claimed responsibility, which resulted in a total of 24 deaths, eight of those being terrorists. Three years have gone by since the massacre of that August and despite the passage of time many questions remain unresolved, starting with the role of the imam from the town of Ripoll, Abdelbaki Es Satty, an informer for Spain's intelligence service, the CNI, who was visited several times by members of the Spanish National Police before the attacks.
Es Satty had been recruited by the CNI in 2014, in return for favours after he was arrested and imprisoned: he would not be deported to Morocco, would be provided with access to the Ripoll mosque and in return would provide security services with relevant information on any unfolding development which could lead to a radicalization process and finally a violent event. The CNI has stated that Es Satty got out of its control but the truth is that all the parliamentary investigations that have been proposed have been vetoed. First with a PP government and in recent times with a Socialist one. Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez have both thus led the deep state response, which is to uncover as little as possible beyond the official versions.
It is not an exaggerated reaction to wonder why the Spanish state was so unresponsive when many lives of ordinary people were lost and the convulsion in Catalonia was major. From those days, there is also the action taken by the Catalan police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, in resolving a terrorist attack on their own and emerging as a rounded police force capable of dealing with a very difficult situation in record time and in the face of a certain vacuum from the state security forces and especially from its political leaders.
Why can't the attacks be investigated at parliamentary level? Why is the Spanish government not the first to want to move towards a satisfactory explanation, first for the families of the victims and then for the general public? As long as the inaction on this continues, enough doubts will continue to hang over the matter to ensure that no definitive version can be given.