Rabat- A 14-year-old girl was arrested, along with another teenage girl, in Spain for attempting to join a network that sends volunteers to fight with the Islamic State jihadists.
“For the first time in Spain, two women, including an underaged girl, were arrested as they were about to join terrorist cells of the Islamic State,” or ultra-radical Sunni jihadists, according to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
A video released by the Interior Ministry showed two women dressed in black niqabs getting off a plane, each flanked by two policemen. The video did not specify where the girls had been transferred.
The 14-year-old girl and the other girl, Fauzia Mohamed Allal, aged 19, were arrested in Melilla, the Mediterranean town at the north of Morocco disputed by Spain and Morocco. “The two women were willing to cross borders to Morocco to contact the network that would send them to a conflict zone between Syria and Iraq,” the Ministry said in a press release.
“Their plan was to join one of the cells of the terrorist organization of the Islamic State, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” the Ministry highlighted, stressing that it was among the first arrests in Spain “after the call to jihad launched on August 1st by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”
The Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz had warned in March, on the anniversary of the Islamist attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, that “Spain is one of the strategic objectives of global jihad.”
Since 2004, he added, 472 jihadists have been arrested in Spain, 105 before this year.
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