The roommates of the Algeciras attacker: "He said he saw the devil"

The dilapidated backyard of number 10 Ruiz Tagle street in Algeciras is a chaos of clothes half put in the washing machine and thrown on the floor.

Everything is mixed up, partly because of the search by the police, partly because its inhabitant, the alleged murderer Yasine Kanjaa (arrested for killing the sacristan of the Church of La Palma, Diego Valencia, with a machete and seriously injuring the parish priest from San Isidro, Antonio Rodríguez) had been destroying everything for weeks.

Mohamed —one of his flatmates, who asks for a fictitious name— points to a light blue sequined stuffed animal lying on a staircase and blurts out: "He said that was the devil."

The tenant of the

one of the eight who lived in the building, has spent a sleepless night testifying for the police, after his partner fatally attacked the sacristan of the church of La Palma and seriously injured another parish priest of the nearby temple of San Isidro.

Mohamed shows Kanjaa's few belongings, accompanied by his cousin and another of the colleagues who experienced the gradual process of mental degradation of the attacker, investigated for alleged jihadist terrorism.

But the 28-year-old, a waiter in a bar in the port of Algeciras, has little doubt that what he met is related to Islamist radicalism: “He is a paranoid person, it is not jihadism.

He threatened his companions with a knife.

The kid is not well, he used drugs, he left them and he began to pray ”.

Corridor of the squatted house inhabited, among other people, by the Algeciras attacker Marcos Moreno

But Kanjaa, apparently, was not like that when he arrived at the house and went to live on the run-down ground floor of the house with two other Moroccans, a few months after he ended up with an expulsion order from the country, as is the case with the majority of migrants who arrive in the country by boat.

He was from Oued El Marsa, a small town next to Castillejos where other tenants of the house are also.

“He was a normal boy, who dealt [with drugs] and consumed joints.

He took money from him and wore a tracksuit and his 120 ″ shoes, explains Mohamed.

Until something changed in him about two months ago, when he stopped consuming the drugs he used to take and started wearing djellabas.

He began to talk about magic, witchcraft and demons, shouting "there is no god but Allah" in Arabic, but the waiter does not remember seeing him consume jihadist material, or even going through the city's mosques, as confirmed by two of these centers. religious.

"Perhaps he has passed through a mosque, but we can confirm that he was not known," explained Mohamed El Mkaddem, imam of the Al Huda temple and spokesman for the Islamic community in Campo de Gibraltar.

“I didn't want some to drink alcohol or for others to have a girlfriend without getting married.

It got worse, one of the kids left here scared, two weeks ago he threatened to kill us, and so on until now… ”, recounts the 28-year-old Moroccan.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Kanjaa was already even more agitated than usual.

Mohamed was at work when, around six in the evening, he received a voice recording from his cousin, locked in the apartment on the top floor, scared by what he was hearing below.

"Something is happening, get up fast," he snapped at her in Arabic.

“He picked up a knife.

His colleagues asked him what he was doing with it and he told them 'I have this so that whoever wants to end my life can take it out of the way,' Mohamed assures that his friends told him when they got home from work.

By then, the alleged murderer was already on the loose through the streets of Algeciras, in an erratic coming and going that led him to go twice to the church of San Isidro (the second time is when he attacked the priest), assault a Moroccan boy and , finally, deliver the fatal machete blows to the sacristan of the temple of La Palma.

Kitchen of the 'squatted' house. Marcos Moreno

Mohamed is hammered by what happened.

After barely arriving in Spain as a minor, he turned 18, lived on the street, sold scrap metal and did "everything he had to do" to end up with a stable job.

He has been living in that house for more than two years, on the first floor, where his wife and little daughter occasionally go.

"I have a good relationship with the neighbors, they know it," he justifies himself.

A neighbor next door corroborates this: “They don't mess with anyone.

It is a house where many kids come and go, they are just passing through.

They are at the door and do nothing, they have sometimes helped me get my daughter's cart up, but I don't pay much attention to them because she scares me”.

That is why the waiter now feels that Kanjaa has broken the peaceful coexistence of the street with a murder that he believes he could have prevented:

“I wanted to report him because I was afraid for my wife and daughter, but the rest of the colleagues don't have papers and they asked me not to call the police in case they were taken away.

If I had, this wouldn't have happened."

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The ground floor where the alleged murderer lived with his companions is now turned upside down.

The scrambled mattresses coexist with documentation that previous tenants left behind and with papers from the attacker himself, such as a document that shows how the now detainee took clothes to his brother.

"He is in a juvenile center," explains Mohamed.

There are bills for driving lessons, business cards, medication and a paper written in Spanish full of intentions to do that was not from the alleged murderer.

"He barely knew how to speak Spanish," adds the waiter.

In the midst of the chaos, some boards torn from the ceiling point to the place where the attacker "had hidden an ax that the police have taken," according to the 28-year-old Moroccan.

Mohamed has burned the last time he saw Yasine Kanjaa, it was at dawn from Wednesday to Thursday, in the same room where he now works for EL PAÍS, when the police brought him to be present at the search.

"I wanted to insult him, to tell him: you are a murderer who lived here with me."

He did not do it, but he did make it clear to the investigators that he was going to throw himself into helping the investigation: “I already told them, I am more concerned than they are about what has happened.

Let's see what will become of us now…”.

One of the inhabitants of the 'squatted' house.

Marcos Moreno

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