"We abandoned Es Satty because he was an idiot."
This is how a former head of the fight against jihadism of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) summarizes the relationship of the intelligence service with Abdelbaki Es Satty, the leader of the Barcelona and Cambrils terrorists of 2017. A secret agent had visited him in prison in 2014, when Es Satty was serving a sentence.
"When he gets out of jail", clarifies the CNI source, it was thought "whether to reactivate the relationship".
"But what the hell are we going to do with that one," the case officer commented.
The CNI still decided that a psychologist would personally interview the contactee.
“And she told us not to waste our time with this guy,” according to the former counterterrorism official.
The past of Es Satty, known as Ripoll's magnet, is a loose end in the current thread.
His 20 years in Spain ended hours before the young jihadists recruited from his mosque in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees murdered 16 people between La Rambla in Barcelona and the seafront in Cambrils on August 17, 2017. The night before, Es Satty and one of his beardless jihadists had blown up a chalet where they had more than 100 kilos of explosives ready to attack and with which, according to the judicial investigation, they were considering doing so against the Sagrada Familia, in the heart of the Catalan capital.
Rewinding his journey, the information generally refers to Vilanova i la Geltrú, in the province of Barcelona, whose mosque he also directed and which was the scene of an anti-terrorist operation in 2006 from which Es Satty emerged surprisingly immune.
By then he had already been convicted of human trafficking and would later be convicted of selling hashish.
The video of this second trial, held in Ceuta at the end of 2011 and published exclusively by EL PAÍS, shows an Es Satty defending himself with a delirious alibi and whom the judge demands that he stop telling "over and over again the same story ”.
The conversation with the former senior CNI official took place at the end of 2021 on the outskirts of Madrid and is part of the investigation of a recently published book,
The Confidant and the Terrorist
(Ariel) which, among other cases, traces the life of the terrorist Es Satty in Spain.
Before the fanciful defendant scolded by the judge and after the "imbecile" that the psychologist ruled out and who would end up as an imam in Ripoll, Es Satty had other faces: a prolific father in Morocco, an undocumented imam in Vilanova, a regular in having relationships with prostitutes in Castelldefels, junk dealer, trafficker, exemplary prisoner and jihadist leader, in addition to his often questioned relationship with the State security forces, which remains partly unexplained.
Abdelbaki Es Satty (Bab Taza, 1973; Alcanar, 2017) grew up in a very conservative family in northern Morocco, married at 18 and had six girls in the first seven years of marriage.
In 1998, he emigrated to Spain.
He worked as a seasonal worker in Jaén, and there he made a friendship that would mark his life and also his death: Belgacem Bellil, an Algerian suicide bomber who attacked the carabinieri barracks in Iraq in 2003, and whose example Imam Es Satty privately claimed after out of prison in April 2014.
Belgacem and Es Satty moved to Vilanova in the early 2000s, where they shared a flat again.
“Yes, the Algerian.
They were friends, do you understand me?”, says a confidant of the Civil Guard, the later called protected witness B5 in the 2006 operation. Es Satty was the titular imam and then substitute of the Vilanova mosque.
“They have put that he was a radical, but he was a radical during the day!” adds B5, before recalling the night the imam asked him to “go whores” and he took him to the nearby Castelldefels highway.
He paid the magnet.
Between 2006 and 2010, Es Satty made a living transporting: scrap metal, furniture, olives, immigrants and hashish, between Catalonia and Morocco.
Across the Strait, she had three more children (nine in all).
“He was the junk dealer”, sums up H., a young Moroccan from Tarragona who in those years he considered his “girlfriend”.
"I didn't feel like that," she said in a conversation on May 30, 2019, in a town near Salou.
H. was 34 years old.
After the attacks, and as a protected witness, he declared that Es Satty was a "lying, secretive and cold-blooded" person, according to the summary of the La Rambla attacks.
“He even threatened me.
He pulled a gun on me,” he added in 2019.
When he entered prison after the Ceuta cache, Es Satty, according to his own handwritten letters from prison, invented a delirious alibi: he accused a Moroccan brother-in-law of H. of being the owner of the cache of 121 kilos of hashish located in the double bottom of his van in the port of Ceuta.
Not only that.
According to Es Satty, the Moroccan had married H.'s sister to keep a close eye on him and to obtain information from him.
That was the “roll”, adorned with other even more incredible twists, that he drove the judge mad at the December 2011 trial.
After leaving the Castellón prison in April 2014, he worked as an imam in a mosque in the city.
He struck up a friendship with a couple of young Spaniards, converts to Islam, whom he tried to recruit.
One of the episodes he told them about was the attack in Iraq in which his friend, the Algerian Belgacem, "had crashed into a truck, killing a lot of people," according to one of those young men, Cristian.
In the trial for the attacks on La Rambla and Cambrils, Cristian was asked if Es Satty explained to him how to act in Spain: “Yes, at one point he said that you had to take an excavator and dig a hole in a mountain and make one base.
Come on, things that I thought 'this man is not right', declared Cristian, who did not believe it and had moved away from the imam because he thought he was" a crazy person ".
In January 2015, Es Satty left Castellón and settled in Ripoll, where shortly after he began to act as an imam.
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