In Barcelona, five minutes of 'pure panic' and 'absolute terror'

BARCELONA — It was another mellow summer afternoon on a world-renowned boulevard, a site of teeming crowds and bustling cafés. Then there was a flash of white.

A rented Fiat van swung onto La Rambla, a broad, tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare, and the driver pressed down hard on the gas. Almost immediately, he began to maim and kill.

“The van was just plowing down people,” said Carlos Tena, 34, a native of the city who was leaving work with two colleagues.

He watched as the van streaked by, “zigzagging right and left,” and then he saw what the driver was leaving in his path.

 

“I saw a little boy, in really, really bad shape, just lying there with his mother. He was not moving. His mother asked me with her eyes if I could help,” Tena said.

 

“My heart split in two,” he said. “I still don’t understand what I saw.” He said he did not know the boy’s fate.

 

The attack on Las Ramblas, as the district featuring Barcelona’s scenic, Belle Époque promenade is known, was the worst terrorist attack in Spain since March 2004, when 192 people were killed and nearly 2,000 were injured in a coordinated series of bombings on the Madrid rail system. In this latest attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State, 13 were killed and more than 100 injured. A separate vehicle attack south of Barcelona early Friday left another person dead and six injured.

 

The carnage in Barcelona on Thursday provided yet another example of a chilling new reality of urban life in Europe: ordinary vehicles suddenly transformed into weapons of mass murder.

Since July 2016, European cities such as Nice, Berlin, Stockholm and London have all suffered vehicle attacks, often impromptu operations designed to kill as many as possible with minimal preparation. Preventing these attacks has proven to be a major challenge for local authorities across Europe, who insist they cannot police everyone who gets in a car and drives near a crowded area.