Spanish police have confirmed the identity of the driver suspected of killing 13 people in last week’s attack in Barcelona.
He is 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub, officials said, and the manhunt has been extended across Europe.
Authorities earlier said they could not rule out the possibility that he had slipped across the border to France.
New CCTV footage from the day of the attack appears to show him fleeing the scene on foot.
Three images in El Pais newspaper allegedly show the man walking through La Boqueria market, wearing sunglasses, as he passes other people heading away from Las Ramblas.
Police say they are investigating the possibility that, some 90 minutes later, the suspect stabbed and killed a Spanish man and stole his car. He appears to have been alone at the time.
Two hours after the attack, 34-year-old Pau Pérez from Vila Franca was found dead in his vehicle. He is the 15th person confirmed dead following the two attacks.
Thirteen were killed when the van, allegedly driven by Moroccan-born Abouyaaqoub, swerved through crowds in the busy area Las Ramblas in Barcelona on Thursday, and one woman died during a second attack in Cambrils hours later, in which five attackers were killed by police.
On Sunday, Catalan police chief Josep Lluís Trapero said that of the 12 suspects, only one – assumed to be Abouyaaqoub – remained at large.
Four others were under arrest and there were two sets of human remains to be identified, Mr Trapero said. Five were killed during a second attack in Cambrils.
French media report that the vehicle used in Cambrils had been caught on speed cameras in France’s Essonne region the previous week. But a direct link between the group of attackers in Spain and the car’s appearance in France has not yet been established.
It has now emerged that an imam living in the town of Ripoll, where Abouyaaqoub and several other suspects came from, is suspected of recruiting young people to an extremist cause.
Family members of the dead suspects said they believe Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty radicalised several young people from the town.
A picture is now emerging of Imam Satty as a possible ringleader or key organiser of the 12-strong terror cell, the BBC’s Europe reporter Gavin Lee said.
The imam apparently left the mosque in June for an extended trip to Morocco, but a flatmate told the BBC he had been seen in Ripoll as recently as last Tuesday.
BBC
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