| Spain releases video showing ‘model plane attack’ on mall |
MADRID Spanish authorities released on Saturday a video seized from three suspected members of Al Qaeda arrested recently, showing an apparent trial attack using a model aircraft.
Media reports said on Monday the planned target was a shopping mall in the British territory of Gibraltar, to be hit during the London Olympics.
Police found the video in the home of one of the suspects, Turkish national Cengiz Yalcin, in the Spanish city of La Linea de Concepcion across the border from Gibraltar, the interior ministry said.
It showed the radio-controlled model plane taking off, then dropping an object, followed by an apparent explosion on the other side of a hill, and the back view of a man running towards the spot.
An interior ministry spokeswoman said it indicated that the aircraft was to carry an explosive charge with which to carry out an attack.
The video had been taken from a computer image and was accompanied by a commentary in Spanish, which the spokeswoman was unable to explain.
The interior ministry also released three photographs it said were taken at Yalcin’s apartment, showing a trapdoor under a bed leading to a hidden room, which was empty.
Police arrested Yalcin at his home on Thursday, while the other two suspects — both of them Chechen — were picked up near the central city of Ciudad Real as they travelled by bus to Irun, a Spanish town on the border with France.
The authorities found enough explosives in Yalcin’s home at the time of his arrest to blow up a bus, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz has said.
A Spanish judge has remanded all three in custody, Yalcin for “possession of explosive substances and devices with terrorist aims” and the other two — identified as Eldar Magomedov and Mohamed Ankari Adamov — for “belonging to a terrorist group and possessing bomb-making material.”
The judge based his decisions on information provided by US, French, Russian and Gibraltar authorities, according to Spanish court documents.
Agence France-Presse
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