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A warning from the director of Europol, Rob Wainwright (pictured above), who has urged this Monday for European police forces and intelligence agencies to work together to stop terrorism, in so far as the prevention of attacks is getting ever more difficult, as those in Barcelona and Cambrils have demonstrated. "If we shared information, many lives would be saved", although the threat from terrorism "cannot be reduced to zero", he said.

"We know that many terrorists have criminal records. Let's open up our databases to check each others' information", he said in an interview with the Today program on British BBC Radio 4.

"Not always is anything known about them in the police records. That was, I'm afraid, [what] happened in Barcelona. The police had little or no knowledge about the suspects in advance... We have to therefore maximise the precious information that we have from all possible sources," said Wainwright.

“I see an increase significant in the exchange of information between countries and agencies, but we have to go further. The threat [from terrorism] has been at the highest level for a long time and is of a great complexity”, the director emphasised.

His statements come in the middle of a debate about the blocking of information from the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) by Spanish police forces.

Databases

Europol is the European Union agency that manages and coordinates criminal and security information. The Spanish State is represented there by the National Police, Civil Guard, Customs Surveillance and is about to add Ertzaintza, the Basque police. The Spanish government has repeatedly denied access to the Mossos, despite them have anti-terrorism powers and against the demands of the Catalan Interior ministry.

The difficulty of the current jihadist terrorism lies in the fact that “we're dealing with a very diffuse community of thousands of radicalised individuals out of whom any one can become a terrorist at short notice,” according to Wainwright. 

The EU is currently promoting a project to collate the information in international criminal databases. This project, says Wainwright, will allow for a more effective surveillance of the most suspicious terrorist activity.

The current wave of jihadist attacks in Europe started in January 2015, when a series of attacks in Paris left 20 dead. The latest large attack was that on 17th August in Barcelona. Wainwright also explained that, in spite of the increased collaboration between the different police forces of the EU since 2015, there are still pending questions to resolve for the fight against terrorism to succeed.