The National Police arrested this Sunday afternoon in the Sevillian municipality of Montellano a young man born in 2007 and of Syrian nationality in the course of an operation against jihadism that remains open, as confirmed by sources close to the investigation to EL PAÍS.
Explosive material was found in the home where the 16-year-old minor resided.
The sources of the investigation ask for caution and deny one of the versions circulating in the municipality that it was the young man's mother who alerted the authorities.
“The operation is still open and there could be more arrests or ramifications,” say the interlocutors consulted.
Investigators are analyzing the material that was taken yesterday from the house where the detainee lived with his mother and his sister, younger than him.
The young man has been transferred to Madrid and the investigation, carried out by agents of the General Information Commissariat, dependent on the National Police, has been declared secret.
The town, with 7,000 inhabitants, experienced moments of chaos on Sunday afternoon when its neighbors saw the deployment of the operation by the agents who blocked several streets in the center.
The nervousness forced the City Council to issue a statement on social networks calling for calm and stating that the National Police had informed them that there was "no risk for the population", although the investigation would continue "in the next few hours", due to which was made “a call for tranquility.”
Sources from the Consistory indicate to this newspaper that after the turbulent hours experienced yesterday since the police deployment began around four in the afternoon on Sunday, the municipality, located in the extreme south of the Sevillian countryside, has woken up "with total normal".
The mayor of the municipality, Curro Gil, has confirmed that the detained young man lived with his mother and a little sister.
It was a family of Syrian refugees perfectly integrated into the municipality where they had arrived about two years ago.
An impression shared by the owner of a haberdashery shop near the house where they lived and of which the detainee's mother, who had set up a sewing shop, was a regular customer.
“They had impeccable behavior.
We knew all three of them,” he says in a telephone conversation.
The classes at the institute where the minor attended have not been suspended and, in fact, the director told the families yesterday that the school day was going to pass normally, the councilor has pointed out, although it is true that many kids do not They came to the center today.
There are already several young people who in recent months have been detected by state security forces and bodies for having fallen into the networks of jihadism.
Six since November 2023, including this latest arrest in Montellano, reports
Óscar López-Fonseca.
That month, two teenagers were arrested in Palma de Mallorca and Plasencia (Cáceres) for spreading radical Islamist proclamations on video game channels frequented by young people.
Last Monday, three other minors (two in the province of Madrid and another in Barcelona) had their manuals seized to make triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a powerful homemade explosive known as
Mother of Satan
.
Previously, in September of last year, the Civil Guard arrested a woman of Spanish nationality in Vitoria for indoctrinating her four daughters in the ideology of jihadist terrorism.
In 2022, however, there was only one minor arrested for these crimes.
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