The Spanish Interior Ministry has warned prison guards and other prison officials to take extreme caution over threats to their safety from Jihadi inmates after threats made in a radical Islamic magazine.
the Interior Ministry warned prison employees to take more precautions with their safety after the Central Group of Information and Operational Control of the Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions detected a threat to prison officials in an Islamist magazine.
“Kill all the guards, follow them home and stab them,” the author of the article in the magazine is said to have written, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports.
An internal document, dated April 28th, from the Interior Ministry calls on prison officials to “act with caution, aware of the existing risk,” with the note being signed by the penitentiary centre of Pamplona.
According to El Mundo, the penitentiary centre of Zaragoza-Zuera in Aragon houses 16 radical Islamic inmates listed on the files of inmates for special monitoring (FIES), a special programme for inmates linked to organized crime, terrorist groups, or those considered particularly dangerous within the prison.
Four of the FIES prisoners at Zaragoza-Zuera are said to be members of an armed gang or terrorist group, while eight others are linked to violent incidents on other prisoners or prison officials or have a history of escape attempts.
Across all of Spain, there are an estimated 250 or more radical Islamic jihadi prisoners, up from 118 in 2015.
Islamist attacks within prisons have been seen in neighbouring France, where extremist Bilal Taghi was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2019 for attempting to stab two prison guards to death at Osny prison in 2016.
In March of 2019, 27-year-old radicalised inmate Michael Chiolo attacked prison officials at the Conde-sur-Sarthe prison in Normandy with a knife during a visit by his wife, who was later shot dead by police.
In Austria, an Albanian-born man who was sentenced to nine years in prison for plotting a terrorist attack in 2017, was back in court in 2020 after threatening to behead another inmate within an Austrian prison and forming a terrorist cell within the prison.