At 4:53 p.m. on August 17, 2017, a white van driven by Younes Abouyaaqoub approached La Rambla from Pelayo Street and traveled at high speed 800 meters towards the sea, running over hundreds of people. He stopped at the Joan Miró mosaic, 200 meters from the Boquería, and fled on foot through the market. Up to 14 people died from the accident and more than 100 were injured. The total number of fatalities was 16, including the boy from Zona Universitaria and a woman from Cambrils (Tarragona) that same morning.
The jihadist attack perpetrated by the Ripoll cell in the heart of Barcelona - Abdelbaki is Satty, the local imam killed in the Alcanar explosion, was its ideological mastermind - is nine years old with several pending accounts, a political struggle that has spread and become intertwined with the process and a victims' office in Catalonia that has not been launched until 2026, with obvious difficulties and limitations. Today, the tribute will be in the Plaza de Sant Jaume for the works on La Rambla.
"In this procedure the victims have been the ones largely forgotten in the investigation." This is how clear the judge of the National Court, Félix Alfonso Guevara, was in the May 2021 ruling. A ruling that Robert Manrique, victim of the Hipercor terrorist attack and advisor to the defunct Unitat d'Atenció i Valoració a Affectats per Terrorisme (Uavat), always carries with him, and which represented a first step to begin to settle some of the pending accounts.
The ruling of 17-A recognized 368 victims of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils (in addition to the explosion in Alcanar or the escape of Younes) for physical injuries or psychological damage. It should be noted, to understand the magnitude of the sentence, that 225 were additional, since the Ministry of the Interior had not admitted them through the previous administrative procedure. The Supreme Court declared the sentence final in 2023, which represented a first compensation for the "mistreatment" suffered, according to Uavat.
Regarding the compensation paid (to which victims of terrorism are entitled), the Interior responds that a total of 232 victims have been compensated, both before and after the finality of the judicial resolution (179 in this case) through the General Directorate of Support for Victims of Terrorism. In this sense, they allege that "currently all requests have been resolved", except for four contentious-administrative appeals, and that 190 affected parties have not submitted requests for compensation after the Supreme Court declared the ruling final. A large part of them had already been compensated previously by the Ministry of the Interior, they added without specifying the specific information to questions from this newspaper.
For his part, Robert Manrique criticizes that there are still unpaid compensations - a third, according to the accounts that he denounces due to lack of location, or because they do not even know that they appear in the sentence, for example - and also disgraces the administration that it has not followed up or supported those affected to see how they have evolved over these years.
Furthermore, he has demanded in Congress that the one-year period set in Spain - in France it is 10 - be extended for victims of terrorism to request compensation, aid and financial compensation after suffering an attack or consolidating its consequences, one of the keys in this case. "There is a very clear example, that of a girl from Madrid, who was in Barcelona spending a few days on 17-A and suffered the attack on La Rambla. They had to operate on her leg twice, once at the Clínic and another at the Gregorio Marañón. She contacted me following the anniversary of 11-M in 2019, we started the procedures and when she submitted the application they told her that it was out of time." Manrique also adds that there are 125 people who appear in the summary but not in the sentence.
In Catalonia, this year the victims' office that the Generalitat closed at the beginning of 2012 - under the Government of Artur Mas - and that those affected by 17-A had been demanding to open since minute zero, has started up in an embryonic form and with considerable legal limitations. From the Ministry of the Interior they explain that one of the most important advances has been the publication in the official journal of "the transfer of data of the affected people" between the different services that have been able to assist them - from the police to medical emergencies, for example -, although due to the Data Protection Law the Generalitat cannot be proactive in contacting directly with those affected and looks for formulas to alleviate it. The organization will have a psychologist, a legal advisor and several external advisors and it is expected to increase the pace of work starting in September.
The investigative commission forced by Junts
On the political level, the independence movement continues to agitate the conspiracy theory - without any proof almost a decade later - and it does so in Congress and with the permission of the PSOE, which gave in with the investigation commission on 17-A in exchange for Junts' support for Pedro Sánchez. After more than a year of appearances and sessions - from the former head of the CNI in Gerona to one of the convicted jihadists - the approval of the conclusions has been postponed until September due to the lack of agreement between both blocks. Among other things, Junts maintains that "part of the responsibility" for the attacks was due to "negligence or recklessness on the part of the secret services" for hiding the links of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) with Abdelbaki es Satty, the imam of Ripoll (Gerona) considered the mastermind of the attacks.
For its part, ERC raises, among other issues, that the State "failed in prevention" and points to the existence of "possible negligence in the management of the information" that the CNI and the Mossos had about Es Satty, but does not go as far as Junts.
