Terrorism : Spain still wants to collaborate with Morocco after the Barcelona attacks

While Abdelouafi Laftite, The Minister of Interior was holding talks with his Spanish counterpart, Juan Ignacio Zoido, Abdellatif Hammouchi, head of the Moroccan secret services, accompanied by Abdelhak El Khiam, head of the Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations (BCIJ), met with three security officials in Spain.

The meeting was reported and covered by Moroccan local media outlets but almost neglected by the Spanish ones. Only Cadena SER, a Spanish online newspaper briefly mentioned the visit without getting into details.

Furthermore, the official account of La Guardia Civil on Twitter did not talk about the visit knowing that one of their senior officials took part of the meeting. The same thing applies to the website of the Spanish Ministry of Interior which nevertheless published a long report dedicated to Zoido and Laftit’s meeting. It also shed light on what the two Ministers declared to media.

Welcoming the work of the DGST

The meeting of Hammouchi and El Khiam with José Luis Olivera, Director of the Terrorism and Organized Crime Information Center, General Pablo Salas, Head of La Guardia Civil Intelligence Services, and Enriqué Baron, Commissioner-General for Information of the National Police is primordial for the Spanish side.

During the same day of the official visit, ECD online newspaper praised the efforts put forward by the Moroccan intelligence services, particularly welcoming the efficiency of their work exchanging information about the Jihadist cell in Spain.

Sources from La Guardia Civil told the same source that unlike the Belgian, Madrid is the only Spanish interlocutor of the Directorate General of Territorial Security which deals with security and counter-terrorism.

The Spanish security forces fear that the intelligence services from Europe and Morocco would turn their backs on them and negotiate directly with the Catalan intelligence services.              

For the record, the Autonomous Government of Catalonia plans to hold a referendum on their independence day celebrated on the 1st of October.