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Barcelona attacks: Grief replaces hope as father lands to find Julian Cadman

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Barcelona: Seven year-old Australian boy Julian Cadman was killed in the Barcelona terror attack, his family and Spanish officials have confirmed.

The Ministry of the Interior said he had been identified through DNA.

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Andrew Cadman lands in Barcelona

The father of an Australian boy missing since the terrorist attack in Spain has touched down in Barcelona.

An hour before Andrew Cadman touched down in Barcelona on a desperate mission to find his missing son, Spanish police issued a statement that suggested tragedy awaited him.

"Neither we were searching nor we have found any lost child in the Barcelona attack. All the victims and injured have been located."

Mr Cadman was met by Australian consular officials at Barcelona airport on Saturday afternoon, local time, and driven directly to the Ciutat de la Justicia. He was whisked away through another exit while a family member exited past the waiting media.

According to a Catalan government statement, the Ciutat de la Justicia is where victims of the Las Ramblas terror attack are being identified by forensic experts.

The man was then taken, with police car escort, to the hospital where his wife Jumarie "Jom" Cadman is being treated for injuries sustained in the terror attack on Barcelona's Las Ramblas boulevard, where a van driving at high speed mowed down more than 100 people, killing more than a dozen.

Mrs Cadman was separated from her son in the attack.

Both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop referred to him on Friday as "missing", and the Department of Foreign Affairs said it would not comment "for privacy reasons".

But Spanish newspaper El Pais highlighted the confusion surrounding the boy, saying police told them they had included the boy on their list of victims and injured from the start, and had not reported him as missing.

Police told the newspaper they knew where the boy was, but could not comment on his location or state of health out of respect for the family.

The Daily Mail reported that five relatives and friends of Mrs Cadman were at her bedside at the Vall d'Hebron hospital, where she had undergone surgery and was now receiving care in a surgery recovery unit.

A Vall d'Hebron hospital spokesman said he had been asked by the family and by British and Australian consular officials not to talk to the media about the family's situation, beyond confirming the woman remained in a "menos grave" medical condition, which translates as "less serious".

Fairfax Media understands Mr Cadman was offered the option to spend the night at the hospital, which will also offer him trauma counselling.

A witness has told how Julian's seriously injured mother begged for information about her son as she lay wounded following the attack, News Ltd reported.

"I was at her side helping her, telling her, 'be calm, don't worry'," Fouad Bakkali told the newspaper group.

"She was asking all the time about her little boy. She asked me, 'where is my son?'.

He said it appeared she had suffered broken legs, a back injury and a head injury.

The mother and son were visiting Barcelona for a wedding this weekend when they were caught up in the deadly terror attack.

Mr Cadman stayed behind in Australia.

The boy's family members had posted pleas on social media asking for help locating the boy. However the pleas were later taken down.

Relatives of Sydney woman, Suria Intan who is in hospital with injuries sustained in the attack, also arrived in Barcelona on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the investigation into the Spanish terror attacks has focused on a cell of radicalised young men from the town of Ripoll, north of Barcelona in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Earlier on Saturday the Spanish interior minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said the jihadist cell behind the attack on Barcelona had been fully dismantled. But the claim was later contradicted in Spanish media reports.

Spanish newspaper El Pais said police had killed five terror suspects in Cambrils, after they used a car to attack pedestrians in the seaside resort town in the early hours of Friday morning. The men killed included the brother of the suspect believed to have driven the van down Las Ramblas.

Police believe at least three, and perhaps up to five people from the group died on Wednesday in an explosion in the Alcanar home where the terror cell had been trying to make bombs using butane and propane gas cylinders.

Four suspects linked to the group have been arrested, including a man injured in the Alcanar explosion, and the owner of the car used in the Cambrils attack.

But police were still hunting three more suspects – though some may have died in the Alcanar explosion

They include Moroccan-born Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, whom police suspect drove the van through Las Ramblas before fleeing on foot. Police were investigating whether he was behind a deadly carjacking later that night.

They were also looking for Youssef Aalla, the brother of one of the terrorists who died in Cambrils, and who may have been working on the group's explosives.

And they were looking for Abdelbaki Essatty, a former imam, who police said had radicalised the perpetrators of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils – though according to other reports Satty was one of the dead in the Alcanar explosion.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that Abdelbaki was a 45-yearold "marabout", a Muslim hermit, who was imprisoned for drug trafficking but was released in 2012.

While in prison he befriended one of the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Once released, he was said to have been connected to a group of Islamists arrested in 2006 for recruiting Islamist fighters to go to Iraq.

On Saturday police searched Abdelbaki's home in Ripoll – the home town of most the terrorists and suspects so far identified by police.

He was not there, but a housemate told the paper that he had last seen Abdelbaki on Tuesday, and thought he had gone on one of his regular trips to his former home country of Morocco.

The two terror attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils left 14 dead and more than 120 wounded.

Nine of the 14 people have now been identified, Catalan emergency services said on Saturday afternoon, including 8 from the Barcelona attack and one from Cambrils.

The Barcelona dead include four Spaniards, two Portuguese, one Italian and one American. Another Italian and a Belgian woman have been separately identified as killed in that attack.

More than 50 people were still in hospital on Saturday, 13 in critical condition.