He has never seen the face of the man who tried to kill him. He barely heard his voice. Alejo Vidal-Quadras was on his way home from his customary stroll in Madrid's Retiro Park when a figure behind him uttered the words: "Hola señor."

At 1:30 pm on Thursday, November 9, 2023, the street he was walking on, Calle Nuñez de Balboa, was packed with people. The 78-year-old Spanish politician, who was vice president of the European Parliament before founding the far-right Vox party, was just a few steps from the entrance to his building. "I turned around and made a movement that saved my life," he told Le Monde. "I tilted my head." The man behind him pulled the trigger, but the 9mm Parabellum bullet that should have split his skull went through his jaw instead.

Passers-by rushed to the aid of the politician as he staggered on the pavement. One man took off his jacket and pressed it against his wounds to stem the bleeding until help arrived. Vidal-Quadras then spent 16 days in hospital, where he underwent facial reconstruction. A few weeks later, when Spanish investigators came to question him at his home, he didn't hesitate for a second: He accused the Iranian regime of being behind his assassination attempt.

Vidal-Quadras heard only two words and the crack of a gunshot before collapsing. But passers-by described his assailant. Dressed in a blue jacket and wearing a motorcycle helmet, the gunman fled on a black Yamaha scooter, an accomplice waiting for him, before vanishing into the streets of Madrid.

Thanks to CCTV footage, the scooter was found two hours later, burnt out, in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Fuenlabrada, some 20 kilometers south of Madrid. It lay on the road like a charred skeleton, but the flames had not obliterated its chassis number and investigators quickly connected it to an individual who had been checked two days earlier on the same scooter. This was a Tunisian national who grew up in Villejuif in the southern suburbs of Paris, by the name of Mehrez Ayari.

At the headquarters of the Versailles Judicial Police, the revelation of the identity of the suspect in the Madrid attack came as a shock. Ayari was well known to them – for more than a year they had been trying to find him in order to arrest him in a separate case. Ayari was suspected of the murder of a small-time cannabis dealer, committed 15 months earlier in August 2022, in Val-d'Oise, north of Paris. The day before the attempted murder of Vidal-Quadras, investigating officers had obtained an international arrest warrant for him from the investigating judge in charge of their case.

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