National Police arrest a returned Moroccan who was recruiting and indoctrinating young people in Vitoria and a Spanish woman who collaborated with the terrorist group DAESH in Alicante

Officers from the General Intelligence Headquarters of the National Police arrested a former al-Nusra fighter, a 41-year old Moroccan national, in Vitoria (Alava) on Wednesday, who, after returning from Syria, performed a key role in the indoctrination and recruitment structure to support DAESH, with the ultimate goal of sending followers to the centre of the Jihadi struggle in Syria and Iraq to fight for the terrorist group DAESH.

The two operations, which remain ongoing, were carried out under the supervision of Central Investigation Court Number 6, in coordination with the Public Prosecutor's Office of the National High Court, with support from the National Intelligence Centre (Spanish acronym: CNI) and the Moroccan Directorate-General for Territorial Surveillance.

The individual detained in Vitoria received military training from the al-Nusra Front, the subsidiary of the terrorist organisation Al Qaeda in Syria and the Lebanon, later abandoning the group after disagreeing with some of its tenets, and then forging ties with DAESH.

The investigations uncovered the fact that over the last two years he had focused his activities on recruiting young people, preferably of Moroccan origin, from the district of Tolosaldea. Specifically, he had focused his attentions on those who were easily influenced, with whom he established close, personal relations on an almost daily basis, expressly evading, based on their extensive IT knowledge, the use of social media as a safe way to avoid being detected. The influence the detainee exercised on his followers led them to leave their families and environments to travel to Syria and carry out "violent Jihad" on behalf of DAESH.

In September 2013, following a profound process of alienation, a young Moroccan travelled to Syria with the detainee to join up to the al-Nusra Front, where they both received training in the use of firearms. The young recruit died in the Syria/Iraq conflict zone two years later. His family declared that, before his relationship began with the detainee, he was a young man with neither religious instruction, nor a radical background, who was trusting and easily influenced.

Arrested in Alicante for collaborating with DAESH

National Police officers arrested a 36-year-old Spanish woman in Alicante on Wednesday, 15 February, for collaborating with the terrorist group DAESH and for trying to travel with her four young children to the Syria/Iraq conflict zone to join up to the ranks of this terrorist group.

The woman arrested in Alicante carried out important propaganda work through social media, where she used very aggressive language, Jihadi emblems and published videos she had edited herself, of an extremely violent nature, displaying a radical Islamic ideology supporting the cause of Palestine. She also collaborated with DAESH by means of virtual contact she maintained through a well-know recruiter, located in Syria, who works on behalf of this terrorist group.

The detainee had undertaken all the formalities necessary to travel with her four young children to the conflict zone. Her intention was to meet up in Syria with her husband, who had gone there to fight for DAESH in 2014, where he may have held a senior position.

In order to achieve her goal, she even reported the fictitious disappearance of her husband and father of her children, while fully aware that he was fighting in the conflict zone, in order to obtain absolute parental authority and thus be able to travel while avoiding the legal obstacles that prevented her doing so until then. In light of the impossibility of travelling from Spain by plane, she began her journey with her children by car, through France, finally abandoning her trip after hearing the news of the death of her husband.

Following her return from France, she once again settled down in Alicante where she began to work very hard through the social media, on the one hand, with the aim of finding a husband over the Internet, thus complying with the guidelines established by DAESH for the widows of martyrs of the terrorist group and, on the other hand, publicly praising the figure of her husband as a Jihadi fighter.

The detainee declared her profound hatred for Western culture and directly conveyed this to her children, with the radical discourse and violent behaviour of one of them attracting significant attention, something unusual for someone of such a young age.

In her daily life, she used significant security measures to avoid detection, particularly following the departure of her husband in 2014, when her name, together with that of her husband, appeared in the media.

Since 2015, the year in which the Ministry of Home Affairs raised the Counter-Terrorism Alert Level to level 4 (Spanish acronym: NAA-4), the law enforcement agencies have arrested a total of 190 Jihadist terrorists.

The Ministry of Home Affairs sends out a reminder that, through the initiative STOP RADICALISMOS, citizens can collaborate through a series of channels open to them so that, in a confidential and secure manner, they can notify the State law enforcement agencies of possible cases of radicalisation in their vicinity through the web page www.stop-radicalismos.es, the mobile phone app for citizens security alerts Alertcops and the free hotline 900 822 066.