February 1, 2023 - 1:30pm

Last week, on Spain’s southernmost outpost of Algeciras, 25-year-old Moroccan national Yassine Kanjaa left his apartment to head into town. He had been illegally squatting there for three years, but it was clear that he would not be returning any time soon. 

After vandalising artefacts and verbally abusing parishioners at a nearby church, Kanjaa, armed with a machete, stabbed and seriously injured a priest. Later, at another church in the area, he chased down a sexton and slit the man’s throat in a nearby square whilst crying “Allahu Akbar”, all videotaped by shocked onlookers. The church worker, Diego Valencia, died on the spot. 

If last week wasn’t a harbinger of a change in public opinion against illegal immigration from the MENA region, it’s hard to fathom what will be. Granted, Spain has known far deadlier attacks: 193 people died when Al-Qaeda bombed Madrid’s Atocha train station in March 2004, while 13 were killed in the more recent series of car-ramming attacks in Barcelona in 2017. Yet this latest incident is better placed than its precedents to trigger a long-overdue national debate on illegal immigration: how much of it is tolerable, and what means can be employed to limit it.

While the 2004 and 2017 culprits were all legally residing in Spain, Kanjaa was not an asylum seeker, with a deportation order pending since last June. Having been radicalised during his time in Spain (he’d begun consuming ISIS propaganda a few weeks before), the police’s failure to prevent Kanjaa from carrying out his violent spree is a worrying sign that Spanish intelligence is not up to the task of protecting innocents from would-be terrorists. 

Kanjaa’s case raises alarm bells not just because of the speed of his turn from an unassuming young immigrant into a potential terrorist, but also because he had undertaken that process entirely on his own and unnoticed by police. Indeed, Kanjaa’s flatmates recall him as constantly alone — first smoking pot and drinking heavily, then transitioning to regularly listening to the Quran on his headphones. 

Yet the fact that his sharing of ISIS-linked content on Facebook — for a month leading up to the attack —  circumvented the police’s radar raises questions about the speed and efficacy of Spanish intelligence. These are questions the public deserve to have answered if such attacks are to be prevented in the future.

What is now needed is an open discussion between all major parties on how to deal with the problem. And yet, a full week after the killing, no such debate is happening beyond the confines of Vox, Spain’s Right-wing, immigration-sceptic party. Even the Right-of-centre Partido Popular, with whom Vox is rumoured to be mulling a coalition come the next race in December, has taken to downplaying association between the attack and Islam, or with immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

One would think the Left, meanwhile, might have softened its views since rising to power in June 2018 as part of a coalition between Podemos and assorted socialist parties. Yet the Spanish Left has turned more, not less, pro-migration since, denouncing Vox’s pronouncements on this matter as “xenophobic”.

Politicians of the Right and Left turn a blind eye to this problem at their own peril. This cannot remain an issue exclusive to the Right-wing fringes: it must become a national one. Otherwise, it risks denying the rest of Spaniards a debate on how to change policies in order to prevent future attacks from happening. And that is the real danger.


Jorge González-Gallarza is the executive director of the Madrid-based think-tank Fundación Civismo and co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast (@UnDecencyPod)

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