Europe

Police and Civil Guard arrested 15 jihadist minors in 2024, five of them with plans to attack

Police and Civil Guard arrested 15 jihadist minors in 2024, five of them with plans to attack

Concern continues to increase among the State Security Forces and Bodies as a reality becomes clear: jihad is targeting children and adolescents in Spain. There is one piece of information that confirms this unequivocally: 15 of the 81 arrested in 2024 for jihadism were minors, and five of them had plans to attack.

It is almost a 20% of the total arrests made by National Police and Civil Guard, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior. The last arrests of minors occurred in December, when the Police dismantled a cell made up of four young people between 14 and 17 years old who had planned an attack against the Basilica of Santa María in Elche (Alicante).

Like this one, many other operations show this trend that has set off alarm bells in the Home Office. All this, while the operations of law enforcement forces against terrorism in Spain have reached this 2024 a new record.

Furthermore, the 81 detainees represent a slight increase compared to the 78 arrests in 2023, which was then the highest number of arrests in Spain for jihadism since the attacks in Madrid in 2004, which left 131 arrests that year and another 92 in 2005. .

According to anti-terrorist sources revealed to EL ESPAÑOL, it has currently been observed “a notable increase” in attempts to recruit young people, adolescents and children by organizations such as Daesh (Islamic State) or Al Qaeda. They are already a clear target of jihad, with numbers of radicalized young people that continue to increase.

Another piece of information that demonstrates this is that revealed by the procedures of 2023 in the National Court. Until 19 of the 26 minors Those who underwent criminal proceedings in this judicial body did so for crimes related to radical Islam.

Influenced and “vulnerable”

The Ministry of the Interior experts dedicated to combating this type of organization are clear that there is a pattern among the indoctrinators, who have found a niche from which to feed. “Young people and minors are a sector of the population more easily influenced; mainly, through new technologies”these sources point out.

Indoctrinators take advantage of them to inoculate adolescents with propaganda in which terrorist acts are idealized, as if they were something “heroic and attractive”, something full of emotion. They offer them “a mission or adventure, in the style of video games or action movies.”

As explained by the National Strategy Against Terrorism 2023terrorist and extremist propaganda is constantly evolving, adapting to new technologies and methodologies in order to access “to a broader, younger and more vulnerable audience”.

Perhaps that is why researchers encounter operations like the one in November 2023, when the Civil Guard arrested two minors for spreading Daesh propaganda in video games on-line.

Researchers have confirmed that organizations such as Daesh or Al Qaeda intend to instrumentalize teenagers to increase tension in the West and even provoke a terrorist attack. And this new strategy of attracting followers to the jihadist cause is carried out on the Internet, via on-line. A space in which the new generations invest a significant number of hours a day.

As verified by the researchers consulted by EL ESPAÑOL, there is no specific profile of adolescents to recruit. Radicalized minors belonging to different social origins have been detected.

There are, for example, Spanish converts, second and third generation minors raised and born in Spain, and also of course immigrant minors recently arrived in national territory.

Incremento de operaciones

La actividad policial en esta materia también se ha incrementado de forma notable en los últimos años. Eso se ha notado en 2024. El número de operaciones antiterroristas impulsadas por los servicios de información de la Policía Nacional y la Guardia Civil se han incrementado, pasando de 43 en 2023 a un total de 49 en los últimos doce meses.

Casi con toda seguridad, los datos de 2024 reflejarán que España es, por segundo año consecutivo, el lugar más activo de Europa para las organizaciones internacionales dedicadas al terrorismo yihadista.

Tal y como ha publicado este diario, un informe de Europol elaborado por las fuerzas antiterroristas de toda Europa señalaba a España en diciembre como el país de toda la zona comunitaria en el que más terroristas se detuvieron a lo largo del pasado 2023. Un total de 84, de los cuales 78 eran por terrorismo islámico.

Cataluña, con 25 detenciones, concentra un tercio de los apresados por yihadismo en 2024. Solo en la provincia de Barcelona se produjeron 16 arrestos en 13 operaciones antiterroristas. Los otros nueve sospechosos por yihadismo en Cataluña fueron detenidos en la provincia de Girona.

Tras Cataluña, Andalucía suma en total doce detenidos repartidos en las provincias de Sevilla (4), Granada (3), Cádiz (2), Málaga (2) y Almería (1).

Melilla registró nueve detenidos en cuatro operaciones de los servicios de Información. Le sigue la Comunidad Valenciana con ocho detenciones, siete de ellos en la provincia de Alicante, y Ceuta, con siete arrestos a lo largo de 2024.

Source link