Story By: Ana Lacasa, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash

At least two men have been forcibly detained during a large scale operation against jihad terrorists in Spain.

The operation took place in the small city of 12,000 inhabitants, Bolanos de Calatrava, in the central Spanish region of Castile-La Mancha.

The Mayor of the city, Miguel Angel Valverde, said that the operation was a surprise and that even the local chief of police was only notified shortly beforehand.

Valverde said: “They (the Madrid police force) got in touch with our local police force to inform them of an imminent deployment, without communicating any other reason.”

The mayor confirmed that the operation took place at 6.30am this morning and police agents carried out raids on a series of houses on three different streets in the city.

The national police agents from Madrid were joined by local police officers in a large deployment of vehicles who blocked off the streets and raided various houses.

As yet, the identities and nationalities of those detained has not been released.

Images of the operation show a large number of police officers, all wearing masks and some in full body suits due to the coronavirus pandemic out on the street.

One man can be seen with a t-shirt over his head, being lead to the police vehicle. Other officers follow with boxes of evidence.

A local resident who lives nearby told a reported: “I could hear them shouting ‘police, police’ and you could hear them screaming and suddenly all the police were up around his house where he lives.”

The housemate of one of the detained men was also interviewed, saying he had no idea what had been going on.

The man, who was not been named, said: “I had no idea. They seemed like good people, very calm.”

According to one media source, the radicalism of the suspects on the internet accelerated the investigation.

The large-scale operation is reportedly part of an ongoing anti-jihadist terrorism investigation by a special task force in the capital city, Madrid.

On the 21st of April Spanish police detained three suspected terrorists in the southern Spanish city of Almeria, one of whom is reportedly one of Europe’s most wanted terrorists of the Islamic State.

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