THE killing of a father of two by two teenagers during a town festival has sparked a backlash in Catalunya.
Carles Vilajosana, a father of twin boys, was chased and knifed in the chest on Carrer Sant Jaume in Manresa, an inland city around 60km northwest of Barcelona, in the early hours of September 1.
The outcry has forced the region’s interior minister to deny the ‘misinformation’ that the alleged killers are migrants in the wake of the murder.
At the time of his death, Vilajosana was leaving the town’s correfoc, a fire-run procession in which costumed performers set off fireworks as they parade through the crowd, which traditionally closes Manresa’s annual town festival.
Paramedics from the Medical Emergency System, Catalunya’s ambulance service, tried to save him at the scene, but he could not be revived.
The Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalunya’s regional police force, have arrested two minors, aged 15 and 16, over the killing.
Detectives believe that while just one of the two carried out the stabbing, the other is equally criminally liable. Two more suspects from the same group of up to four have not yet been found.
Investigators are working on two competing theories – that Vilajosana was trying to break up a fight among the group, or that they approached and chased him, possibly to rob him.
Officers have also searched a flat in Manresa’s old quarter as part of the inquiry.
Those who knew Vilajosana described a man with no history of trouble.
David Canyado, the mayor of Castellnou de Bages, the small village near Manresa where Vilajosana lived, called him ‘a very good man’ and said he had never caused any trouble.
Vilajosana ran Bar Estadi, a bar on Manresa’s Carrer Barcelona, and had previously worked at Mas de Sant Iscle, a winery and restaurant linked to his ex-wife’s family.
He held a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and had more recently been working as a gardener, taking on maintenance jobs at properties including the Oller del Mas winery estate.
About 200 people gathered in Manresa’s Placa Major, the city’s main square, for a minute of silence the evening after his death.
Marc Aloy, the mayor of Manresa, condemned the killing ‘unequivocally’ and said the city ‘has been and must continue being a city of peace.’
The council said it would formally join the criminal case as a private prosecutor, a legal step in Spain that lets a local authority act alongside state prosecutors rather than leaving the case to them alone.
The killing spread quickly online, and so did claims about the attackers’ background.
According to crime site ElCaso, the regional Interior Department confirmed that one of the two arrested minors was ‘of North African origin.’
Silvia Orriols, who leads the Catalan nationalist party Aliança Catalana, and Ignacio Garriga of Vox, Spain’s national far-right party, went further, describing the attackers as unaccompanied Moroccan or Maghrebi migrants.
The allegations forced Nuria Parlon, Catalunya’s interior minister, to reject that version on Catalunya Radio the next morning.
“Both of them were born in Catalunya, one to Catalan parents and the other to immigrant parents. But they are Catalan,” she said.
She said the two teenagers were not ‘unaccompanied foreign minors’ – a legal term in Spain for child migrants who arrived in Spain without parents and were placed in state care – as had been claimed.
Parlon named Garriga and Orriols directly, accused them of an ‘opportunistic and xenophobic’ exploitation of the killing, and said the regional government could refer the matter to its hate-crimes prosecutor, a specialist unit that investigates crimes motivated by racism or xenophobia.
Instead she took a different line.
“What is happening to us as a society that two minors, with their whole future ahead of them and families who should be supporting them, end up committing a crime this serious?” she said.
Aloy said false information about the attackers had begun circulating within a day of the killing, and called for a firm response to messages ‘that aim to stoke hatred.’
The two other suspects from the same group have still not been found.
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