Spain prosecutors want church attack suspect jailed for 50 years

Pallbearers carry the casket of late verger Diego Valencia, at the Nuestra Senora de La Palma church, where an attack happened a day earlier, in Algeciras, southern Spain, on 26 January 2023. The city of Algeciras was united in mourning a day after a machete-wielding Moroccan stormed two churches, killing a verger and seriously wounding a priest in the multicultural southern Spanish port. The attacks took place on 25 January evening as worshippers met to celebrate the Eucharist at two churches in the city near to each other. Police arrested the 25-year-old alleged assailant at the scene. CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP

Prosecutors want the Moroccan man suspected of staging last year's machete attack on two Spanish churches, killing a church official, to face 50 years behind bars, court documents showed Friday.

The suspect, Yassine Kanjaa, 26, is charged with terrorist murder for killing the sacristan, prosecutors wrote in the document, a copy of which was seen by AFP.

He is also charged with the attempted terrorist murder with injury for his attack on two other people, one a priest, the wrote.

The attacks took place in the southern port town of Algeciras on 25 January 2023, when the suspect "took a large machete" and entered San Isidro church, badly wounding a priest before entering a second where he chased the sacristan and killed him.

He tried to enter a third but the door was locked and police at the scene arrested him.

In the months before the attack, the suspect had "undergone a process of radicalisation, taking on board the most stringent Islamic theories which uphold its incompatibility with the principles and values of other religions and the need to act to eliminate them", they wrote.

"The suspect chose where to act" and attacked both the priest and the sacristan "with the intention of killing them... and terrorising Christians", the document said.

On the day of the attack, the suspect "presented as having a psychotic disorder with delusions and likely schizophrenia", prosecutors wrote.

But they judged his intellectual capabilities "were not completely eroded by his condition".

After his arrest, police described Kanjaa as "unstable" and he was sent for a psychiatric evaluation to assess whether or not he could be charged.

The authorities said he had never been "on the radar" of the security forces in Spain or elsewhere for radicalisation, although he had been served with a deportation order in June 2021, which had never been carried out.