Spanish police arrest Pakistani man accused of promoting 'Islamist' militancy

The man was allegedly accused of promoting 'Islamist' militancy

MADRID: Spanish police arrested a man from Pakistan in Barcelona on Tuesday accused of promoting 'Islamist' militancy via social media, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The man had been promoting the actions of various groups operating in the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq, especially  Islamic State, the ministry said. Including Tuesday's arrests, Spain has detained 24 people so far this year with suspected links to Islamist militancy.

Seperately, a Milan court on Wednesday sentenced a Pakistani and a Tunisian to six years in prison for threatening terror attacks in Italy via social media.



Tunisian Lassad Briki, 35, and Pakistan national Muhammad Baqas, 27, will be deported after serving their sentences, the judge said after agreeing to the maximum sanction requested by prosecutors.

The two men were arrested in July 2015 in Brescia in northern Italy on suspicion of setting up a Twitter account from which they posted messages threatening to attack iconic Italian monuments like Milan’s Duomo and the Colosseum in Rome.

The threats were accompanied by photos of the monuments and written in Italian, French and Arabic.



“We are on your streets, we are everywhere,” one post read. “We are identifying the targets and await the X hour.”

The sentences were handed down despite the prosecutor in charge of the investigation saying at the time of the arrests that “there was no sign of even the beginning of a move (beyond words) to action.”

The two men had however downloaded an online “manual” which covered the production of home-made explosives, carrying weapons and operating clandestinely on the Internet.