Van plows into Barcelona crowd; 13 dead

BARCELONA, Spain -- A van veered onto a sidewalk and sped down a busy pedestrian zone Thursday in Barcelona's picturesque Las Ramblas district, swerving from side to side as it mowed down tourists and residents and turned the popular European vacation spot into a bloody killing zone.

Thirteen people were killed and 100 were injured, 15 of them seriously, in what authorities called a terror attack.

Victims were left sprawled in the street, spattered with blood or crippled by broken limbs. Others fled in panic, screaming or carrying young children in their arms.

"It was clearly a terror attack, intended to kill as many people as possible," Josep Lluis Trapero, senior police official, said late Thursday at a news conference.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, saying in a statement on its Aamaq news agency the attack was carried out by "soldiers of the Islamic State" in response to the extremist group's calls for followers to target countries participating in the coalition trying to drive it from Syria and Iraq.

Early today, Catalan police said they shot and killed five suspects in a seaside resort town south of Barcelona in response to a terrorist attack.

Police said the suspects were carrying bomb belts, which were detonated by the force's bomb squad.

They also said six civilians were injured in Cambrils but didn't say how.

The force is working on the theory the Cambrils suspects are linked to the Barcelona attack, as well as to an explosion Wednesday night in the town of Alcanar in which one person was killed.

The Catalan regional government said citizens from 24 countries were among the people killed and injured during the Barcelona van attack.

Authorities said the dead included a Belgian, and a Greek woman was among the injured.

Australia confirmed three of its citizens were injured; two others were Taiwanese, and one was from Hong Kong, according to their governments.

Germany was investigating whether its citizens were among the dead or injured.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called the killings a "savage terrorist attack" and said Spaniards "are not just united in mourning, but especially in the firm determination to beat those who want to rob us of our values and our way of life."

After the afternoon attack, Las Ramblas went into lockdown. Swarms of police brandishing handguns and automatic weapons launched a manhunt in the downtown district, ordering stores, cafes and public transport to shut down.

Several hours later authorities reported two arrests, one a Spanish national from Melilla, a Spanish-run Mediterranean seafront enclave in North Africa, and the other a Moroccan. They declined to identify them.

Trapero said neither of them was the van's driver, who remained at large after abandoning the van and fleeing on foot.

The arrests took place in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll and in Alcanar, where a gas explosion in a house is being investigated for a possible connection.

Spanish public broadcaster RTVE and other news outlets named one of the detained as Driss Oukabir, a French citizen of Moroccan origin.

RTVE reported Oukabir went to police in Ripoll to report his identity documents had been stolen.

Various Spanish media said the IDs with his name were found in the attack van, and he claimed his brother might have stolen them.

Media outlets ran photographs of Oukabir they said police had issued to identify one of the suspects.

The regional police told the Associated Press they had not distributed the photograph. They refused to say whether he was one of the two detained.

Barcelona is the latest European city to experience a terror attack using a vehicle as a weapon to target a popular tourist destination, after similar attacks in France and Britain.

"London, Brussels, Paris and some other European cities have had the same experience. It's been Barcelona's turn today," Carles Puigdemont, president of Catalonia's government.

Thursday's bloodshed was Spain's deadliest attack since 2004, when al-Qaida-inspired bombers killed 192 people in coordinated assaults on Madrid's commuter trains.