The Catalan regional government admitted that it received a report last May regarding a possible attack on the Rambla in Barcelona, but that it had "poor credibility" and in any case had nothing to do with the massacre committed by the jihadist cell of Ripoll last August 17th. The existence of the information was published exclusively by the Catalan newspaper El Periodico de Catalunya: it is a copy of a message in English from the National Anti-Terrorism Center, which brings together CIA and FBI, addressed to the Spanish Central Services, to the police Spanish and the Mossos d'Esquadra. The document, writes El Periodico, contains "unconfirmed information, the veracity of which is not known, dated at the end of May and which indicated that Isis planned to carry out terrorist attacks against very popular tourist sites in Barcelona and in particular La Rambla" . The commander of the Mossos, Josep Lluis Trapero, however, stressed in a press conference that the credibility of the report had been judged low by both the central government of Madrid and the Catalan authorities, and that the content of the document was never the subject of discussion. in joint counter-terrorism meetings; furthermore, the Mossos did not receive it from either the CIA or the US intelligence services, although Trapero did not disclose the actual source. El Pais stresses that the disclosure could perhaps have led to the adoption of more general security measures but not to investigations or arrests, since it did not contain any useful clues to that effect; moreover, although the date and the place of the attack are identified two months in advance, the ongoing investigations indicate that the attack was improvised the day before the massacres: the Alcanar explosion in fact forced the terrorists to change last moment their own plans. The existence of a CIA report about a possible attack had circulated in the groups immediately following the massacre, but both the Catalan regional president, Carles Puigdemont, and Trapero himself had denied the news.
