"We can say that the cell has been dismantled," Spain's Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said at the press conference after the meeting of the counterterrorism committee.
According to Zoido, the investigators are checking whether the suspects had links to neighboring countries.
The security alert in Spain is at the fourth level, 1 point below the highest terror threat level, after the deadly terrorist attacks, the Interior Ministry said.
"We have decided not to raise the threat level to the maximum fifth, since after analyzing [the situation] we came to conclusion that there is no inevitable threat," Zoido said.
However, Catalan police cannot confirm the Spanish Interior Ministry's claim that the terror cell behind the recent van attacks in the region was dismantled, Albert Oliva, the spokesman of Catalan police, said later.
"We will not disprove or confirm that. But Mossos d'Esquadra [Catalan police] is carrying out the investigation in coordination with Spanish National Police and Civil Guard," Oliva said.
Later in the day, a source in the Interior Affairs Council of the Catalan government told Sputnik that Spanish police are working on determining the location of three members of the terror cell behind Thursday's van attacks in the country's autonomous region of Catalonia.
"The group included 12 individuals of whom five were killed in Cambrils, four have been detained. We now need to determine the location of the three left," the source said.
Two of the suspects are believed to have died in a blast that razed their alleged bomb-making lab in the coastal town of Alcanar early on Friday. The suspected driver of the van in the Barcelona attack had reportedly fled the scene on foot and is still on the run.
According to media reports, Spanish police is searching for Moroccan national Younes Abouyaaqoub, 22, considering him to be the perpetrator of the Barcelona van attack.
Hours after the incident, another vehicle attack took place in the coastal town of Cambrils, south of Barcelona, killing one and injuring five civilians as well as a police officer.
Daesh terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attacks.
