美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Not A Textbook Case': Barcelona Attackers' Hometown Wonders How It Bred Terrorists

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

We'll have more on Hurricane Irma in a few minutes. But first, an update on last month's terrorist attacks in and around Barcelona. Spanish police say the suspects don't fit the usual ISIS profile. And this might have been a deliberate strategy. Lauren Frayer reports from the terrorists' hometown in the mountains north of Barcelona.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE 1: Teenagers chain-smoke in the village square, trying to process what happened over summer vacation. This village of Ripoll is a tidy place where everyone knows everyone. About 10,000 residents, a Benedictine monastery 2, window boxes bursting with geraniums and almost zero crime. But this was the home of 12 terrorists who attacked Barcelona last month. Most of them were killed. Two are in jail.

PAULA LOPEZ: (Speaking Spanish).

FRAYER: "A week before, we were hanging out with them on this same square," says Paula Lopez. She shows me a cellphone photo of herself and one of the terrorists at a school dance last year. They're beaming, their cheeks pressed together. They were in their teens and early 20s from Moroccan immigrant families and seemed to thrive in small-town Spain. In recent months, two of them, brothers, had started wearing flashy clothes and bought a new car, says another childhood friend, Maria Garcia. She thought maybe the money came from dealing 3 drugs.

MARIA GARCIA: (Through interpreter) Smoking pot isn't a sign of terrorism. In fact, it's the opposite. People who are radicalized don't do drugs. They're religious. Our friends never went to the mosque 5, so we didn't think anything of it.

FRAYER: Investigators 6 are looking into whether a radical 4 imam who moved here two years ago plied 7 the young men with gifts in secret. Either they led double lives, or they were radicalized so recently that no one noticed.

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FRAYER: In her office at the town hall, social worker Nuria Perpinya counsels the terrorists' ashamed and grieving families. She knew all of the young men.

NURIA PERPINYA: (Through interpreter) I think ISIS chose them because they were so integral and smart in such a small town. We need an expert in cults 8 to come explain to us how young brains can change so quickly.

FRAYER: One such expert is Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University. He says the Ripoll suspects may have espoused 9 the ideas of a now-defunct group from 1970s Egypt called Takfir wal-Hijra.

LORENZO VIDINO: Takfir wal-Hijra was of the extreme fringe of jihadism. And they basically advocated it's legitimate 10 to act like non-pious Muslims, which was drinking or smoking or dating, to hide their true intentions.

FRAYER: Spanish police are looking into that theory. Police Inspector 11 Albert Oliva says they've dismantled 12 many terror cells before acting 13 on tips.

ALBERT OLIVA: (Through interpreter) Someone's behavior changes drastically, or they start posting extremist things online. But this was not a textbook case. We have to go deeper with the community's help. Police cannot be inside every living room, every mosque and every friendship.

FRAYER: He says the textbooks have to change. Let the picturesque 14 Spanish village of Ripoll, he says, be a lesson to everyone. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Ripoll, Spain.