ALGECIRAS: The man who is alleged to have stormed two Spanish churches with a machete, killing a verger and seriously wounding a priest, was slated for deportation but had no prior convictions, officials said on Thursday.

The bloodshed, which took place on Wednesday evening in the southern port city of Algeciras, shocked Spain and left locals reeling. The alleged attacker was arrested at the scene and police raided his home in the early hours of Thursday as prosecutors pressed ahead with a terror probe.

The suspect, who was identified by a police source as a 25-year-old Moroccan man, had “no prior criminal or terrorism convictions in Spain or allied countries” and was not under surveillance, an interior ministry spokesman said.

“A deportation procedure was opened in June” but “because it was an administrative procedure... the implementation was not immediate,” he said. Local media reports said he lived close to the two churches which are just 300 metres apart.

Although the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s top criminal court, opened a terror investigation, the government has so far not qualified the nature of the attack.

Speaking in Stockholm where he was meeting his European counterparts, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said it was not yet possible to say whether the incident was of a “terrorist nature”. But he confirmed there were “no third parties involved” in remarks transmitted to reporters.

He would travel to Algeciras in the coming days “to follow the investigation on the ground”, his office said.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2023