A dark, narrow staircase leads up to the seventh-floor flat in the small Catalan town of Ripoll from where Abdelbaki Es Satty allegedly masterminded the terrorist cell that struck in Barcelona last Thursday.

A bottle of the Moroccan imam’s scent sits on a sideboard, the miswak root he used to clean his teeth lies on a bedroom shelf, and his green Qur’an nestles behind the TV where he watched the daily news.



“He didn’t talk much,” said Es Satty’s flatmate, Nordin. “He seemed normal. His face and words were normal. I didn’t know what problems he had in his head.”

The last Nordin saw of Es Satty was on Tuesday morning, when the imam left home with a suitcase, saying he was going to visit his family in Tétouan in northern Morocco.

“He said goodbye and told me he would be back in time for the Lantern festival [on 1 September],” recalled Nordin, who said the imam drove off in a large white car. “I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”

Abdelbaki Es Satty’s Qur’an inside the flat used by the imam of Ripoll. Photograph: Jonathan Watts for the Guardian

On Monday, however, Catalan police confirmed that Es Satty never went to Morocco. Instead, DNA of his remains have been found amid the debris of a bomb-making factory in Alcanar that exploded the day after he left home.

Spanish anti-terrorism investigators are now working on the assumption that the imam was the “catalyst” in the radicalisation a cell of a dozen mostly young Moroccan men in Ripoll, where he had been leading prayers and teaching Arabic for the past two years.

There were three sets of brothers among the alleged terrorists, many of whom went to the local Abat Oliba school and played football on the pitches next to the Ter river.



Ripoll is no Muslim ghetto, but a quiet, moderately prosperous town nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is famous for its monastery, Santa Maria de Ripoll, which was founded in the 9th century by Count Wilfred the Hairy, an important figure among Catalan nationalists.

About 5% of the town’s 11,000 population are Muslim. Most are Moroccans who started arriving in the early 1990s to work at local factories.

Interviewed on Monday, Ripoll’s officials and residents expressed their shock that boys who were considered good students could have had their heads turned to the point that they were responsible for last week’s atrocities.



Unemployment has risen in recent years but local officials discounted it as a major factor in the radicalisation of the town’s terror cell, because most had jobs or were students. “We’re in shock. These boys were raised among us. There’s no ghetto here. They were our neighbours,” said Dolors Vilalta, the secretary of security in the municipal government.

“We had no inkling. If we had a hint we would have acted, but there was nothing,” she said. “Trust is broken. The feeling of security is gone. But we can’t give in to anger. That would be dangerous. We must move on.”

Relatives, friends and neighbours blame Es Satty. After he arrived in town, young Muslim men spent more time at the mosque.

One local Catalan man, who declined to give his name, said he used to play football with Younes Abouyaaqoub, confirmed by CCTV images released on Monday as the man who drove a van into crowds on Las Ramblas.

“He was a quiet guy who never seemed violent,” he said of the Moroccan, who grew up in the community.

Members of the Muslim community in Ripoll gather along with relatives of young men believed responsible for the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils to denounce terrorism and show their grief. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

Younes’s brother Houssaine, who was shot by police in Cambrils early on Friday morning, worked at a local kebab shop and was said to be friendly to all his customers. “They must have been brainwashed,” said a schoolfriend. “Otherwise I can’t see how they would have done this.”

A 21-year-old Catalan woman – who like many others declined to give her name because everyone knows everyone in this small town – said she had known one of the terrorists, Mohamed Houli, since childhood.

“He was a good friend,” she said. “At school he never had any problems with anyone. He loved football and cycling. Everyone thought he was Catalan.”

Houli was found alive in the ruins of the bomb factory blast. He has been arrested and his testimony is thought to have been the key to the progress of the investigation.

Es Satty had been identified as a person of interest even before his DNA was confirmed at the bomb factory.

He was the only one of the 12 suspects with a criminal record. According to Spanish media reports he was convicted of marijuana smuggling and had spent time in Castellón prison in Valencia, where he is said to have met at least one of the perpetrators of Spain’s last major terrorist attack, the Madrid bombing of 11 March 2004. Local media say his name was also mentioned in reports about the recruitment of Spanish youths who went to Syria to fight for Islamic State.

Nordin says police came to search the home on Friday night. They climbed into the attic, looked inside the cistern and ripped off ceiling panels. The imam’s room is still as they left it – clothes pulled from drawers and dumped on the floor between a skewed mattress.

A police officer stands guard at a blocked road near Ripoll. Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP/Getty Images

They also questioned Nordin, who moved into the flat’s other small room four months ago. The 45-year-old Moroccan market stall worker – who did not want to give his full identity because he fears repercussions for his family – told them the imam had never received a single visitor at the apartment. In June he had left for more than a month, saying he was visiting family in Morocco. He returned less than a week before the attack.

Nordin said Es Satty rarely read his Qur’an and would only pray in his own room or the mosque. “Islam had nothing to do with the killings here or in France,” he said, then tapped his head again. “The problem is here.”

At the town hall, the mayor, Jordi Munell, looked as if he had not slept for days. He said he was not just grappling with the security operation and the media attention, but the bigger question of how this happened. “We don’t understand. These boys weren’t marginalised. They were neighbours, teammates, supermarket workers, schoolfriends.”

The trigger, he guessed, was the arrival of the imam in 2015. Although he gave no indication of being a radical, Es Satty was withdrawn from wider society. The mayor believes he was quietly grooming local youths to become jihadists, not openly at the Islamic centre or the mosque but through personal connections among a group of friends and brothers.

“He was like the guru of a sect who captivated some weak-minded young men and the seduced them into horrific acts of indiscriminate barbarity,” Munell said.

The mayor is now trying to heal the wounds in his community.

“I hope people here can be emotionally intelligent enough to distinguish between the Daesh [Islamic State] jihadists and the Muslim community. The Islamic groups here want good relations and to play a part in society. Daesh wants to divide us and disrupt our lives. They don’t want us at the beach, at football stadiums, at Las Ramblas. We must fight them by continuing to go to those places and by continuing to play football with our Muslim friends. If we don’t Daesh is the winner.”