Radicalized in a month, the alleged perpetrator of the attack on two churches in Algeciras, in the south of Spain, acted “consciously” and within the framework of a “jihadist” ideology, according to justice Spanish, who placed him in pre-trial detention on Monday.
The judge in charge of investigating this machete attack accused Yassine Kanjaa of “terrorism” on Monday and placed him “in detention”, announced in a press release the National Court, Madrid court in charge of terrorism cases.
In view of the first elements of the investigation, the action of this 25-year-old Moroccan “can be qualified as a jihadist attack”, directed in particular against representatives of the “Catholic Church”, added the National Audience.
Yassine Kanjaa is accused of having attacked Wednesday shortly after 7:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT) the priest of the church of San Isidro in Algeciras, a port city of 120,000 inhabitants located in southern Andalusia, using a machete. The latter, aged 74, was seriously injured in the neck, then hospitalized.
According to the authorities, he then went to the Nuestra Señora de La Palma church, a few hundred meters away, where he attacked a sexton, on whom he inflicted “several fatal injuries”. The sixty-year-old sexton died in the square in front of the church.
According to the National Audience, three other people were injured by Yassine Kanjaa. Among them is a man of Moroccan nationality whom he allegedly attacked “with the desire to kill him”, accusing him of having distanced himself from Islam.
Arrested immediately after the facts, Yassine Kanjaa had been the subject of an expulsion procedure for irregular situation since June, according to the authorities. This young man, who lived not far from these two churches, was also unknown to the intelligence services, according to the Ministry of the Interior.
In a court document consulted by AFP, the magistrate in charge of the case made the link between this attack and “jihadist Salafism” on Friday and said that after his arrest, the suspect had “several times shouted Allah Akbar ” (“God is the greatest”).
But the government had not ruled out the hypothesis of mental disorders. A neighbor of the suspect had told AFP that the young Moroccan “was not feeling well in his head” and that he had “totally changed in just over a month”, letting himself “grow his beard” and dressing “only in djellaba”.
The police also insisted in a press release on Monday on the “unstable” side of Yassine Kanjaa, a young man who “did not have a criminal history” and “whose self-radicalization would have occurred” very quickly.
For Judge Joaquin Gadea, in charge of the case within the National Audience, Yassine Kanjaa had indeed “a life that some describe as normal” a few weeks ago, and experienced “a process of religious radicalization” extremely rapid. .
But in view of the statements of his entourage, the elements found on his telephone and his remarks in police custody, he would have indeed acted in a “conscious” way, by targeting in a “deliberate” way the religious and then the Moroccan that he considered “infidel”, said the judge, quoted by the National Audience.
An approach that fully inscribes its action in the “jihadist phenomenon” intended to cause “terror within society”, even though Yassine Kanjaa acted “alone” and without connection with a “determined terrorist organization”, concludes the judge .
01/30/2023 19:58:34 – Madrid (AFP) – © 2023 AFP