As teenagers, the killers wanted to be footballers and doctors, but were brainwashed
A SCHOOL social worker from Ripoll (Girona province) is keen to show how so-called 'Islamic' terrorists are essentially vulnerable youths given the wrong message: the killers, now all dead or in jail, were 'normal' boys who wanted to be charity workers and pilots.
Her open letter strongly highlights the need to nurture teenagers' dreams and give them a sense of purpose and belonging, since it is only when this is lost that they may fall prey to rogue recruiters who set them on the path of fundamentalist terrorism.
It is believed that the Barcelona and Cambrils terrorists had been 'brainwashed' by a rogue Iman, Abdelbaki Es-Satty, at a mosque in Ripoll, who was killed in the Alcanar (Tarragona province) house explosion that destroyed the weapons with which the cell had been planning an even greater attack.
Until they fell under Es-Satty's spell, they had known nothing about Islam, say sources close to them.
“I'm so hurt that it turned out to be them – I can't hold back the tears,” said Raquel, who taught the Abouyaaqoub and Oukabir brothers when they were pupils at her school in their home town of Ripoll.
“Children who once dreamed of being a pilot, teacher, doctor or charity worker ended up joining the Jihad movement. How could all this have gone up in smoke? What happened to you? At what moment did your ideas change?” Raquel wrote in an open letter in catalán, which has been translated into Spanish by regional daily newspaper La Vanguardia.
“How could it have been Younes?” She wonders, referring to the killer van driver, Younes Abouyaaqoub, who was shot dead in Subirats (Barcelona province) yesterday wearing a fake suicide vest – the last of the terrorists to be caught in a cell that police now say is completely disbanded and poses no further threat.
“I want to explain a few things that will never come out in the press or on the TV. I need to shout it to the four winds, because my heart is breaking so much.
“I've never felt anything as strongly as this, because it isn't rational, it doesn't come from any presentiment that you know something will inevitably happen or which forms part of life's natural course. It comes from somewhere else that I'm not even capable of describing.
“These boys were children like any other. Like my own children, they were just ordinary kids from Ripoll. Like the ones you see playing in the village square, or weighed down with an enormous backpack full of school books, the ones that say 'hi' to you or let you go in front of them in the supermarket queue, the ones that turn into a bag of nerves when a girl smiles at them.
“These sparks which inflame hatred online, in the street, in the town you live in, in the newspapers, really hurt me...this ignorance, grudges, indifference, lack of respect for others, clichés, borders, turning a blind eye, not being capable of putting yourself in others' shoes...
“And all this happens again and again, century after century. What are we doing wrong? We have to stop this. We have to do something.
“Yet I always thought I was doing things right, that I'd contributed my drop in the ocean.
“It's true that I've never experienced terrorism in person, and that what has happened has changed my views. Now I'm watching it from the other side of the fence, I'm absolutely distraught.
“The things that happen on the TV or elsewhere in the world end up becoming diluted in your mind, and forgotten about, and you never really know what's true and what isn't; anger ends up winning the battle, and we even find ourselves proclaiming, 'an eye for an eye' to punish these actions.
“But now, I have feelings I can't contain.
“It's painful to see the Mirò mosaïc stained with blood. It's painful to see this happening in my city. It's painful to realise that there could have been people I know, family members, on the Ramblas, where I've left more than a couple of footprints in the past.
“It's painful that it could have been them, these boys.
“I can't hold back my tears. And I've not been able to stop crying since day one and I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop crying again. I'm distraught, broken inside.
“I know that, at the moment, the balance of support leans towards the victims, the children lost, the families destroyed, the city and its grief. But let me tell you about and show you the other side of the coin – what isn't seen in the papers, what will never be wept for in public, what dries my tears in public because it'd be frowned upon to cry for.
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