Alberto Jimenez Becerril, Popular Party councillor and the deputy Mayor of Seville, was walking home with his wife, Asuncion Garcia, in the Andalusian city in the early hours of yesterday. They took the same route nearly every week after a regular Thursday night dinner date with friends.
But this week, as the couple approached their home in a narrow street behind the vast Gothic Cathedral, two gunmen, believed to be members of the Basque terrorist organisation, ETA, shot them at point-blank range. Mr Jimenez received a bullet in the back of the head, and it is believed that when his wife, a leading Seville lawyer, turned to face the assassins, she was shot in the face. Both died instantly. They leave three young children, aged four, six and nine, two of whom are pupils at a school run by Irish nuns.
The death of the couple, both aged 37, has prompted strong emotions similar to those seen last July when ETA kidnapped and murdered the young councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco - also a member of the Popular Party - in the Basque city of Ermua.
Thousands of people took to the streets yesterday morning in demonstrations of revulsion at the new outbreak of violence. Many had white-painted hands, the gesture first seen after Blanco's death, symbolising hands untainted by blood. Hundreds of bunches of flowers and candles have been placed where the couple died.
Other demonstrations have been called throughout Spain over the weekend. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia cancelled a planned visit to Holland for the 60th birthday celebrations of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Prince Felipe, who yesterday celebrated his own 30th birthday, expressed his horror at the killings.
ETA have carried out other terrorist attacks in Andalusia - 10 in the past two years - mostly against police, Civil Guard or tourist targets, and security police had suspected that the group had some form of infrastructure in the area.
But until this week they believed that it was mainly involved in intelligence-gathering, with special operatives sent in to carry out specific attacks; such intelligence-gathering would have shown that Alberto and Asuncion Jimenez had a weekly Thursday night dinner date with friends. But police now suspect that ETA could have established a small operative group of terrorists in Andalusia, whose identity is not known to police, and a new security alert has been introduced.
It is almost exactly three years since ETA shot and killed Gregorio Ordonez, the Popular Party mayoral candidate in San Sebastian. Since that time they have made targets of several PP officials, resulting in five deaths, two in the last two months, and a third escaped earlier this week when a bomb planted beneath his van failed to explode. The victims were mainly councillors in small towns and villages, but until this week the victims have all been in the Basque country in the north of Spain. The latest killings at the other end of the peninsula have raised fears that the anti-PP campaign could spread nationwide and that all members of the conservative governing party are at risk.
The Seville murders come at a time when political parties and legal experts are debating a controversial proposal to open a special bank account to raise money to provide bodyguards for the hundreds of local PP officials who could be potential targets.