Ex-member of Spanish death squad arrested for Islamic State links
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MADRID - Spanish police have arrested a former member of an illegal Spanish paramilitary group who now is suspected of spreading Islamic State propaganda and planning a suicide attack, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
The man has expressed support online for Islamic State's attacks in European countries over the past year and was preparing to carry out a suicide attack on some form of public transport, it said in a statement.
He served a prison sentence for the murder of a French railway worker in 1984 when he was a member of the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups, or GAL, according to the statement. The GAL were illegal death squads set up by Spanish officials during the 1980s to fight a covert war against the Basque separatist group ETA.
The arrested man, who had travelled to Afghanistan, Syria and the Palestinian territories, was detained by the Spanish police's elite counter-terrorism unit in the town of Segovia, close to the capital Madrid, the ministry said.
"His high level of radicalization has led him to try to obtain the means to commit a terrorist attack, being willing to carry out an indiscriminate suicide attack against means of transport," it said, without specifying any target.
