A MAN who hacked a church worker to death with a machete in southern Spain has been cleared of terrorism charges after a court instead ruled that the bloody rampage was spurred on by a ‘psychotic break’.
Moroccan national Yassin Kanjaa, 28, killed sexton Diego Valencia, 74, and stabbed several other churchgoers during a wicked attack in January 2023.
But judges at Madrid’s National Court today threw out an appeal lodged jointly by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the murdered sacristan’s family.
Instead, they upheld a judgement issued by the court in November that said Kanjaa was exempt from terrorism charges on the grounds of psychiatric disorder.
The ruling means Kanjaa will spend a maximum period of 30 years in confinement in a prison psychiatric facility for his crimes.
The court said the scope for appeal courts was limited to noting errors in the assessment of evidence or the omission of key facts, neither of which occurred in this case.
That meant judges had little choice but to rubber-stamp last year’s ruling, which determined that the defendant, for reasons relating to mental illness, was unable to give his actions the intent required to meet the threshold for terrorism offences.
That includes provoking a state of terror among the population or seriously disrupting public peace, which judges said did not take place.
The original judgement found that Kanjaa suffered from ‘an acute psychotic disorder of a schizophrenic type, with a significant degree of emotional and behavioural impairment, delusional ideas of persecution and messianism, with experiences of control and influence and delusion interpretations that very severely affected his intellectual and volitional faculties’.
“The delusion was so intense that it caused a loss of perception of reality and an inability to control his impulses,” it added.
The horror attack began when Kanjaa entered the San Isidro church in early 2023 and urged the congregation to convert to Islam.
He then returned with a machete and started destroying Christian imagery, before attacking local priest Antonio Rodriguez.
He stabbed the priest in the shoulder and neck before leaving and making his way to the La Palma church 200 metres away.
He continued to smash up property before attacking Valencia, who he hunted down outside in the Plaza Alta main square before stabbing and beating him to death.
Three more people suffered injuries trying to save the sexton.
Police arrived swiftly to arrest Kanjaa, who had been living in Spain illegally since 2019 and was under a deportation order.
He had previously been living in a squat with other undocumented immigrants, who described him as ‘violent and unstable’.
Click here to read more Spain News from The Olive Press.
