One man of Moroccan descent has been officially accused of killing one person and wounding another four as he carried out machete attacks against a pair of churches in Spain.
A 25-year-old man, the suspect was reportedly slated to be deported before he allegedly rushed into a pair of Catholic churches located in Algeciras, Spain, this past Wednesday night, resulting in the deaths of one person and the injury of three others.
As reported by EFE, a prime international news agency for Spain, the alleged attacker screamed “death to Christians” and “Allah is great” throughout the attack. The assault is currently being considered and investigated as an act of terrorism, as reported by Spanish police officials. The office of the public prosecutor stated that the attack was “presumably terrorist.”
The pair of churches that were targeted were the church of Maria Auxiliadora y San Isidro and Nuestra Señora de La Palma. Working as the sexton of the second church mentioned, Diego Valencia was found to be the one killed as he attempted to flee the insane attack.
Another priest who has been injured in the attack, Antonio Rodriguez, is slated to make a full recovery. “If all goes well, he [Rodriguez] may even be released in the next few hours,” explained Algeciras Mayor Jose Ignacio Landaluce.
“We are all stunned by these acts, which have filled us with pain,” stated Landaluce. “Algeciras has always been a city where concord and tolerance reign, despite incidents like this that create an image that does not correspond to reality.”
As recently reported by area media outlets, the suspect had snuck into Spain illegally and was at the time in the process of being deported. He had also been under the watch of Spanish counter-terrorism police due to suspected ties to a number of currently unspecified terror groups.
As the head of the national-conservative Spanish political party Vox, Santiago Abascal officially took aim at the immigration policies of the country in a comment about the attack. “He entered Spain illegally, he had an expulsion order, he was under surveillance for jihadism, he was a squatter. How many will there be like him in Spain? The human trafficking mafias and the politicians who open their borders and shower them with subsidies cannot hide their responsibility,” stated Abascal.
As part of another social media post, he stated that Spain “cannot tolerate Islamism advancing on our soil.”
