MADRID: Spain is facing its highest level of terror threat since 2004 because of the danger posed by militants, said the country’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz on Sunday.

“We are at the maximum alert level since the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid,” said Fernandez Diaz in an interview published on Sunday, referring to the attacks that left 191 dead and nearly 2,000 injured.

The minister said he did not want to incite panic, but “the level 4 alert (out of a maximum of 5) corresponds to a reality”.

The risk is heightened particularly because the head of Daesh, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, recently urged the mujahideen to commit attacks in their countries for the one-year anniversary of the militant organisation, said the minister.

There has been a lot of activity since on social networks, he said, without giving details.

Some 116 people have left Spain to fight alongside Daesh militants, with 16 people registered as having since returned.

Although that is a relatively low number compared to other European countries such as France which has seen hundreds of citizens leave for Iraq and Syria, the minister also highlighted the threat posed by the “frustrated terrorist who completed the process of radicalisation but could not go fight in a war zone”.

Meanwhile, the 30 British victims of last week’s Tunisian beach attack are to receive a permanent memorial funded by fines on banks, Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Sunday.

There will be a separate site of remembrance for all Britons who have been victims of overseas terrorism, he added.

“Those who lost their lives in Tunisia last week were innocent victims of a brutal terrorist atrocity,” he said.

“It is right that we mark and commemorate them and others murdered by terrorists overseas, appropriately and support the loved ones they have left behind in every way we can.”

The location and design of the memorial will be decided over the coming months, said Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood, whose brother Jonathan was killed in the Bali bombing of 2002.

The memorials will be funded by banking fines levied by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The final five British victims of the Tunisia beach shooting arrived home on Saturday, on board an RAF C-17 aircraft.

Their coffins were taken in convoy to a London coroner’s court, where inquests into their deaths will be held.

Cameron also announced there would be a service for those caught up in the Tunisian attack to be held in the autumn.

Tourists fled in horror as a Tunisian identified as 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a furled beach umbrella and went on a shooting spree outside a five-star hotel on June 26.

British holidaymakers accounted for 30 of those killed, along with three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and a Russian, before the assailant was himself shot dead. The attack has been claimed by Daesh.

On Tuesday, Britons will mark the 10th anniversary of the 2005 London suicide bombings that killed 52 people.

The victims will be remembered with a wreath-laying ceremony at London’s Hyde Park ahead of a religious service in St Paul’s Cathedral.