Assassination of Prime Minister Eduardo Dato on 8 March 1921. While being driven from the parliament building, Dato was killed by three Catalan anarchists, Luis Nicolau, Pedro Mateu, and Ramón Casanellas, who were riding a motorcycle.
Dato was the third Prime Minister of the Restoration to be assassinated — after Canovas del Castillo in 1897 and José Canalejas in 1912. The Restoration was the period that restored the monarchy under Alfonso XII first, and then under the Regency of Maria Christina and the reign of Alfonso XIII.
Anarchist attacks persisted in Spain for decades. This was unlike other countries, such as France and the United States, in which violent attacks subsided as the anarchist movement declined. One of the possible explanations for the persistence of anarchist terrorism in Spain, according to historian Avilés Farré, was the nature of the Spanish authorities’ response to terrorism: simultaneously “barbaric, illegal and ineffective” in substituting repressive cruelty for effective police and legal work.