The supremacist organization Combat 18 – which takes the number of its name from the first and eighth letters of the alphabet; a of Adolf and h of Hitler – intended to spread his neo-Nazi project throughout Spain, but a police coup has frustrated his expectations. The National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra arrested 16 people yesterday – 11 in Catalonia – related to the group that is considered terrorist in Canada and was banned in Germany in 2020.
According to police sources, the activity of those arrested during the investigation has been focused on holding multiple meetings to recruit members to join the organization, whose objectives – as stated in their propaganda magazine – are to send all non-whites back to Africa, Asia and Arabia. “Either alive or in body bags.” They also advocate for “eliminating Jews” from public life or “executing” all LGBTI people. The detainees would have produced merchandising to raise money to finance the group, they would have tried to supply themselves with firearms and they would have planned violent actions. In the operation that started early yesterday morning – and is open, so more arrests are not ruled out -, information agents, anti-riots, special intervention groups and the canine unit of the two police forces to register 14 homes – ten of which in Catalonia and four in the rest of Spain – and 13 men and three women were arrested. All of them between 30 and 45 years old, according to the same sources. Eleven of the arrests were made in Catalonia: 2 in Barcelona, ??2 in Lloret de Mar (Girona), 2 in Prat de Llobregat (Barcelona), 2 in Mollerussa (Lleida), 2 in Sentmenat (Barcelona) and 1 in Sant Boi de Llobregat (Barcelona). The rest, in Málaga (2), Lugo (1), Arganda del Rey, Madrid (1), and Ventas de San Julián, Toledo (1).
The disjointed group had also engaged, since the investigations began in April, to carry out an ongoing act of far-right proselytizing in the form of hate speech on racist, anti-Semitic, LGBTIphobic, xenophobic and ideological grounds, that they disseminated on the internet, in instant messaging groups and also physically.
According to the investigations of the researchers in recent months, Combat 18 is included in the violent extremism of an ethnic matrix, with a transnational scope -known by its English acronym Remve-. It has carried out terrorist actions, some with a high death toll.
Among the attacks attributed to the Remve group is the attack by Anders Breivik in Oslo and the island of Utoya (Norway), in 2011, with 77 deaths, during a political event by the country’s Labor youth.