Said Guernica and the Spanish-language press for its role in the attack.

But for their part, the Spanish government has taken strong note of the fact that Barcelona is the only European capital to have fallen at the hands of Islamist extremists, and as so often is the case, has seized on this terror attack to launch a vigorous public relations campaign, with the hashtag #Babylon.

They have also urged the world’s public, which has already shown so much sympathy towards Muslim and other minority victims of terrorism in general, to show similar solidarity towards those who did not have the opportunity to participate in the campaign.

On Saturday, Spain’s Interior Ministry published pictures of a man it called “The Barcelona Bomber”, and said he was a Moroccan born in the 1990s, a father and a husband. According to media reports, the man is a security guard born in 2006 who left his job to join extremist organisations. He allegedly blew himself up in a van as he prepared to leave the Barcelona district of Cambrils, leaving 13 people dead and more than 180 injured.

“This bomber,” a government official briefed the media at a news conference Sunday, “is a security guard who carried out a terrorist attack against the Cambrils market, killing 13 people.”

On Saturday night, Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said that Catalonia had always been under threat and should be considered one of the most vulnerable areas in Europe. Yet with this latest attack, Spanish officials made it clear that the main threat comes from Islamist radicals — and that only Islam can solve this threat.

The attack comes just days after the German government warned that “an increased terrorist threat” may be looming over Berlin, while US national security officials cautioned that a similar situation could unfold in the United States. The Barcelona attack, they added, would likely “solve the terrorist threat.”

And it’s important to note that this is hardly an exclusive problem in Spain, but affects just a handful of cities, and not the whole of Europe.

According to an analysis by David Schanzer of the Combating Terrorism Center, the worst terrorist attacks in Europe have all takenplace in Italy, France, Germany and Belgium since 2005; though not everything is the same and there are some important differences: “When I started tracking them back to 2004, only the French attacks had actually occurred; the German ones occurred in 2009….The differences in the attack