A homeless Syrian man in his 30s has been charged with attempted murder and was detained in France on Saturday in connection with a murder. brutal stabbing In the past week, two adults and four children have been injured, a prosecutor said.
Line Bonnet-Mathis, prosecutor in Annecy, the southeastern French city where Thursday’s attack took place, said there was no indication the attack was an act of terrorism. The attacker, currently in custody, is also charged with resisting arrest with a weapon.
Investigators have yet to determine the motive of the attacker, who, they say, went on a rampage, plunging young families into a playground in one of Annecy’s most popular lakeside parks. , and stabbed his victims with a stapler. outsider, including the so-called backpack herochased the man before the police arrested him.
Authorities did not release the man’s identity but said he had applied for asylum in Sweden, lived there for 10 years and still has a 3-year-old child there. Bonnet-Mathis said he was wearing a necklace of crosses and other Christian symbols at the time of his arrest, as well as 480 euros ($516). The prosecutor added that witnesses heard him mention his ex-wife, daughter and Jesus Christ in the assault.
Ms. Bonnet-Mathis said at a news conference on Saturday that the assailant refused to answer investigators’ questions.
“At the moment, it is too early to assess the motivation behind this action,” she said.
Ms Bonnet-Mathis said two expert judges, who under French law are tasked with investigating the most serious and complex crimes, have opened a formal investigation.
She said that now 6 victims are out of danger and are expected to recover. Four of them are children aged 3 and under, including a French boy and girl who are staying in Annecy with their grandmother, a British girl who is on holiday with her parents, and a Dutch girl who quickly was transferred to Geneva for surgery. speak.
Ms. Bonnet-Mathis said the man, a Syrian refugee born in 1991, was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the attack. The homeless man and witnesses said they saw him sleeping in the common area of a downtown residential building. After leaving Syria, he went to Sweden in 2013 and applied for asylum there, but left in 2022, for reasons that are still unclear. He traveled through Italy and Switzerland before arriving in France, where his asylum application was denied.
Ms Bonnet-Mathis said a psychiatric evaluation found he did not suffer from any “obvious elements of delusion” and was fit for questioning. But the psychiatrist who examined him also warned it was “early” to say if he had an underlying mental illness, she added.
Such attacks have dwindled in France in recent years, but the country remains fearful and on high alert because of previous incidents. France is attacked by Islamic terrorists on a large scale in 2015 And 2016followed by a series of smaller but still deadly shootings and stabbings in the years that followed, often carried out by lone attackers.
