Game over for the jihadist serial killer who terrorized northern Spain

On March 25 in Beziers, France, a joint operation of the French police in collaboration with the Guardia Civil, the Spanish National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra, brought to the arrest of  Allal El Mourabit Ahammarb, a convicted jihadist who, while serving his sentence, escaped from prison and later murdered three farmers in north-eastern Spain before fleeing to France in January 2024.

His first victim was 68-year-old Pedro Oyon, murdered in November 2023 in Tudela; El Mourabit attacked the man as he was leaving work in an olive field and stole his truck. One month later, the killer murdered 80-year-old Jose Luis Aguado, this time in Ribaforada, about 8km southeast of the location where the first homicide occurred. El Mourabit then moved further southeast to Villanova de la Barca, about 200km from Ribaforada and, on January 5^th, 2024, he murdered 84-year-old Ramon Rosell before fleeing to France through Andorra.

The serial killer moved on foot through the Spanish rural areas and spent the night in the fields or in abandoned places eating whatever he could steal from the fields and killing his victims only to steal their vehicles. His modus operandi was always the same: looking for farmers who were alone in the fields, attacking them by surprise armed with a machete and killing them before fleeing with their cars or trucks.

As reported by the Catalan news site Enoticies, El Mourabit was first arrested in the Spanish city of Irun, in 2016, shortly after the Nice terrorist attack where a terrorist driving a truck fatally ran over 86 people. The police tracked El Mourabit since he was very active in spreading jihadist propaganda on social media. Additionally, the individual was intercepted and detained in Turkey while trying to enter Syria to join ISIS. He spent two months in pre-trial detention and was released before being arrested again. His second conviction was overturned since he had been accused twice for the same criminal offenses; the court decided to put him on ankle monitor surveillance and he was forbidden from leaving the city of Vitoria-Gaestiz. However, on September 27^th, 2023, El Mourabit deactivated his electronic tracking device and disappeared from the radar. This week, he was finally detected and arrested in the French city of Beziers, about 100 km north of the border with Spain. The fugitive had cut his long hair to avoid being detected.

On his YouTube channel, named “Allal TGTV”, El Mourabit had posted four videos, all dated between February 6^th and February 25^th, 2019, and recorded from a truck cabin, where he spoke in Spanish and accused the Spanish government of “kidnapping” him in the name of the war on terrorism, of having sensationalized his arrest and then claimed that Muslims were the only victims of injustice.