A former bar worker has been jailed for three years after being found guilty of planning a terror plot centering around football’s biggest club fixture, El Clasico.
According to his indictment, Mohammed Yassi Amrani became a member of the militant Islamic State group during “a fast process” of radicalization in 2020.
After calling for “jihad” in a March 2020 Facebook post, he was then contacted by an Islamic State recruiter through the Telegram messaging service.
The recruiter demanded that Amrani carry out an attack in order to “purify his life and assure a place in paradise” after having drunk alcohol and rejected religion in the past.
This would have involved flying a drone packed with explosives over Camp Nou, the home of FC Barcelona, when they were in action against bitter rivals Real Madrid, and then detonating the device.
Known as El Clasico, the match between the La Liga giants in Spain is regarded as the biggest in club football and is often enjoyed by vast TV audiences.
This past March, Spanish daily newspaper AS reported that in excess of 650 million people had tuned in for recent editions of the fixture.
It was unknown when Amrani was expected to carry out the attack, given that Spain was in a pandemic lockdown – with football matches suspended – at the time he was recruited by the Islamic State.
Reportedly living in Barcelona, Armani was arrested in May 2020 by police who searched his property.
On Monday of this week, Spain’s National Court sentenced him to three years in prison for planning an attack “following an agreement from all sides,” according to a court spokesman.
Amrani’s plot wasn’t the first time that the 99,000-capacity Camp Nou stadium, Europe’s biggest, has been targeted by terrorists.
In August 2017, it made the list of the jihadist cell that killed 16 people in the Barcelona city center and the beach town of Cambrils in Catalonia as part of twin vehicle attacks.