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How Do Security Services Conduct a Man Hunt?

Since the Barcelona attack, Spanish police have killed or arrested 12 suspects including the van driver. How did they find them?
French police raid the house of a suspected terrorist. Credit: Chris93/Wikicommons

Less than a week after Younes Abouyaaqoub drove a van along the crowded boulevard of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, killing 13 people and injuring more than 130, all 12 suspects are now either dead or in custody. So how did the security services find them? And what matters most in a manhunt?

We spoke to Julia Rushchenko, research fellow at the Henry Jackson Centre for Radicalisation and Terrorism, and lecturer in Policing and Criminal Investigations at the University of West London, to get some answers.

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VICE: Hi Julia. How do police and the security services carry out a manhunt in this day and age? Who is involved?
Julia: Of course, there's the police, but at a community level they are looking for people who have a link to the family. It's interesting that in the Barcelona case there was a family connection, and we find very similar situations in many other terrorist incidents. In the Manchester, Paris and Brussels attacks it was brothers involved, and this is something quite interesting. This gives multiple people to investigate, and it also means there are most likely other people that knew about it. The security services look first to the communities.

What immediate action do the authorities take?
Each and every case is, of course, different. The authorities are able to track people. With the Barcelona attack they at first assumed that the person responsible was someone else, however it turned out to be the initial suspect's brother, so the very first day of coverage had some mistakes. However, their response was quite fast. What interests me in this manhunt is that if you look at the detail of the videos where the police are trying to shoot the suspects, you realise there were around 15 to 18 bullets fired by the police, and the suspects were still alive.

The interesting question here is in terms of the operational capacity of the police. Why were they not killed right away? The answer to this lies in police practices in Europe. Police officers carry weapons with low-velocity bullets, unlike countries such as Israel, which have high-velocity bullets, and just one bullet is enough to kill a person completely. Here, because of human rights considerations, it is general practice to use low-velocity bullets.

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Do you think that might change with the increasing terrorist threat?
This could possibly change, but there needs to be an open debate on why. Police officers [might] not be willing to implement stricter measures because there is the potential to be sentenced for collateral damage, but with low-velocity bullets there is very low risk to people around. Often, manhunts happen in very crowded places – for instance, the London Bridge attack. The attackers were slashing people with knives and they were surrounded by people, so the fear is that others will be wounded. There are multiple ethical considerations and there should be an open debate on this.

How has technology made it easier or harder to find people on the run?
What happens every time someone commits a terrorist attack is investigators go into the person's social media profile and they identify pictures of the suspect. So, for example, with the Barcelona attackers, one of them was posting a lot of hate messages online, so we can see that they are already radicalised.

So is it harder or easier these days with social media? Is there always a footprint?
With social media it's certainly easier, because people always leave some trace, whether it's on Facebook or any other social media. Even though they might use different names, there is always a trace, especially with young people. People don't realise how much they are leaving behind them.

How much harder does it become if somebody leaves the country?
If they are trying to leave the country, the danger and the problem with the Schengen Area [the "borderless" area of mainland Europe] is you do not need visas and there are no border controls. On the one hand this is one of the values of the European Union, but on the other, it enables terrorists to slip through the net and move freely from one location to another. However, there's definitely a collaboration between the countries. There is INTERPOL and local security services that work with each other, so there is a certain degree of collaboration.

How easy is it for perpetrators to go somewhere and keep a low profile?
I think it would be quite difficult, because security services have their gatekeepers – people who inform them about communities – and the Home Office has local informers in communities who work with them. It's not easy for a person to keep a low profile. Unless there was a really big international cell involved, where a person can change their identity and have fake documents, which can be the case, then it's very difficult to hide for long.

So basically everything rests on local informants?
Because liberal democracies have high restrictions on implementing the powers of arrest and detention, working with local informants from communities and collecting information on individuals known to espouse extremist rhetoric becomes a priority for intelligence services. There are many ways to recruit them. Some say British converts to Islam have been targeted as potential informants, others suggest that security services pay community members for temporary assignments.

Thanks, Julia. @tessreidy