Police in Catalonia have shot dead a man armed with a knife who attacked a police station on the outskirts of Barcelona, just three days after the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the city and coastal town of Cambrils.

The attack, which police are treating as a terrorist incident, happened in the early hours of Monday in Cornellà de Llobregat on the southern edge of Barcelona.

According to police the man entered the station just before 6am brandishing a knife and shouting: “God is great.” When the duty sergeant urged him to put the knife down he allegedly threw himself at a female officer and was shot dead.



“It was clearly a case of premeditated homicide with intent to kill one of our officers,” Rafel Comes, the commissioner of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, told a press conference. “The individual mentioned Allah and for lack of any other motive for now we are treating it as a terrorist attack.”



The man was provisionally named as Abdelouahab Taib, 29, an Algerian national with Spanish residency. The identification was based on documents found on his body, but police were also running a fingerprint check to confirm his identity. His fingerprints have also been sent to international agencies. Police said Taib had no criminal record.

Comes said there was nothing to connect him to the terrorist cell that carried out the attacks in Catalonia last summer. There were reports that Taib’s Spanish wife had left him a week before the incident.



Ismael Moreno, a judge at Spain’s national court, said an investigation had been opened and confirmed that the attack was being treated as an act of terrorism.

The desk sergeant and female officer who witnessed the incident were being examined by the force’s psychology team. “In a terrible experience such as this, the post-traumatic effects often surface days or weeks later,” Comes said.

In what appeared to be a reference to complaints of a lack of coordination between the various police forces during last summer’s attacks, Comes said that as soon as the incident occurred the information was shared with local and national forces.



Sixteen people were killed on 17 August 2017 after a van drove into crowds on Barcelona’s popular Las Ramblas boulevard and a knife attack in the nearby resort of Cambrils.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks, Spain’s worst since the Madrid train bombings in 2004 when 191 people died and more than 1,800 were injured.

Spain has had its terrorist alert at the second-highest level since 2015.



Catalonia has a long history of Islamic militant activity. A member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) was uncovered in the region in 1995.

Mohammed Atta, who flew a passenger plane into one of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, spent time in Catalonia shortly before the attacks.

In 2008, a plot targeting Barcelona’s metro system was foiled when it was in its advanced stages.

One in four people detained in Spain over extremist Muslim-linked terrorism come from the province of Barcelona in Catalonia, according to a study published last year by the Real Instituto Elcano, a Spanish thinktank, which called the province the country’s “main centre of jihadist activity”.