They praised jihadist groups and their terrorist actions and had reportedly even received manuals on how to make triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a powerful homemade explosive known as Mother Satan. National Police agents arrested last Monday at dawn in the provinces of Madrid and Barcelona three minors between the ages of 15 and 16 as suspected perpetrators of the crimes of self-indoctrination and glorification of terrorism because they had used a digital platform to spread messages in which they used the application advocated and justified violence against non-Muslims, as reported by the Ministry of the Interior and the Public Prosecutor's Office of the National Court. Police stressed in a note that the teenagers had “demonstrated their intention to act against those who did not agree with them and were viewed by them as apostates.” Last November, two more young people were arrested in Palma de Mallorca and Plasencia (Cáceres) for also spreading radical Islamist proclamations on video game channels frequented by young people.
The so-called Operation Dardasha began after the police, during their cyber patrol work on social networks, discovered the existence of two chats called “Hispanic Islamic Organization” and “Islam Server” on the Discord platform, which were used by young video game fans to communities of users with similar preferences. According to the public prosecutor's office, both chats contained “jihadist terrorist narratives and propaganda of an extremely violent nature and with the clear intention of indoctrination and recruitment.” The investigations allowed researchers to identify the people who created them and provided them with content. These were three “young, underage, highly radicalized students with an ideology that is fully compatible with the jihadist postulates advocated by the state.” Islamic (ISIS in its English acronym). “Given their desire to commit an action and the distribution of tasks they had begun, including the production of the explosives, the officers in charge of the investigation proceeded to arrest them,” police said in a statement. Satan's Mother is the substance produced in large quantities by the jihadist cell that carried out the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils in August 2017, and whose accidental explosion killed three of its members.
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Those arrested are BN, 15 years old and residing in Móstoles (Madrid); AE, 16, who was in a shelter in Madrid's Usera district at the time of his arrest; and HB, also 16 and living in Barcelona. During the search of the houses, officers confiscated a “large amount” of electronic devices as well as extensive documents, which are currently being analyzed. The three were placed at the disposal of the Central Juvenile Court of the National Court this Tuesday, which, at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office, ordered their transfer to a closed regime center where their development will be assessed within two months.
The radicalization of minors has become a major concern in the fight against terrorism. In the study “Jihadism and jihadists in Spain: 15 years after 11-M” published in 2019 by the Elcano Royal Institute, there was already a “surge” in jihadists who had begun their radicalization process at a young age. According to the report, between 2001 and 2011, Islamists who became fanatical as minors accounted for 17% of those arrested and killed in Spain; a percentage that increased to 25.9% between 2012 and 2017. In this sense, the authors of the analysis noted that in 2012 “there was a particular interest in the indoctrination and recruitment of children and young people by jihadist radicalization agents operating in Spain.”
After the arrests in November, Interior warned that these young people had set up their own broadcast channels on networks frequented by minors. “The new reality of radicalized digital natives is one of the emerging global phenomena in the field of terrorism,” warned the Interior Ministry. In June 2022, a 15-year-old teenager was arrested in Algete (Madrid), in whose possession a large amount of Islamic State propaganda material was found, including videos of attacks and instructions for making explosives. The young man, who began consuming jihadist content at the age of 12, was sentenced to stay in a closed juvenile detention center until he came of age for self-indoctrination and was then placed on probation.
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In addition, last September the Guardia Civil arrested a woman living in Vitoria who had “indoctrinated” her four children (all boys under 12), whom she “manipulated” and “impregnated” with the terrorist’s “ideology.” with which he intended to go to Iraq. According to the regional court, this suspected jihadist encouraged her children to become “combatants,” that is, “terrorists willing to kill, die and burn themselves.” This mother also used social networks and internet platforms to spread extremist propaganda and gain followers.
The arrest of the three minors last Monday came at a time of particular activity in the fight against jihad. So far this year, the General Information Commissariat (CGI) of the National Police has carried out 23 operations in which 57 suspected jihadists have been arrested, 39 of them in 10 operations carried out in the last two months after the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza, prompting the interior to strengthen security measures to combat terrorism.
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