PARIS | The suspect in the assassination of three Kurds on Friday in Paris, who admitted feeling a “pathological hatred of foreigners”, left the psychiatric infirmary of the police headquarters on Sunday and will be presented to an investigating judge on Monday for a possible indictment.
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This 69-year-old French retiree was placed in police custody on Sunday afternoon, the prosecution said. It had been lifted on Saturday at the end of the day for health reasons.
He is accused of killing Emine Kara, a leader of the Kurdish Women’s Movement in France — and two men, including artist and political refugee Mir Perwer.
Three other men were injured, one seriously, but their lives are no longer in danger and one of them has left the hospital, according to the latest report released on Sunday. Five of the six victims are of Turkish nationality, the last French.
Friday’s attack shocked the Kurdish community, which denounced a “terrorist” act and blamed Turkey.
The investigators favor the track of the racist crime, the alleged killer having himself said to have acted because “racist”.
In police custody, he explained his “hatred of foreigners that had become pathological” since a burglary of which he had been the victim in 2016, according to Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
He described himself as “depressive” and “suicidal”. “But before committing suicide, I always wanted to murder migrants, foreigners, since this burglary,” he said in police custody.
To do this, he first went, early Friday morning, to Saint-Denis, a popular town north of Paris, with his weapon, “a Colt 45 automatic pistol of caliber 11.43″, to ” commit murders on foreign people,” according to the prosecutor.
suicidal thoughts
But, “he finally gives up taking action, given the few people present and because of his dress preventing him from reloading his weapon easily”, she specified.
He then returned to his parents’ house, then came out to go shortly before noon to a neighborhood where he knew of the existence of a Kurdish cultural center, and opened fire.
“Indicating that he is angry with “all migrants”, he claims to have attacked victims he did not know, specifying that he is angry with the Kurds for having “constituted prisoners” during their fight against Daesh (acronym in Arabic of the jihadist organization Islamic State, editor’s note) instead of killing them”, affirmed the public ministry.
He “intended to use all the ammunition and kill himself with the last bullet”, but was stopped by several people at a nearby hair salon before being arrested by the police.
The first elements of the investigation did not establish “any link with an extremist ideology”.
The suspect claimed to have acquired his weapon four years ago from a member of the shooting club, to have hidden it without using it until Friday.
Already convicted in 2017 for carrying a prohibited weapon and in June for violence with weapons on burglars – the facts he mentioned in police custody – he has been indicted since December 2021 for violence with weapons, with premeditation and racist in nature.
He is suspected of having stabbed migrants at a camp in Paris on December 8, 2021.
After a year in pre-trial detention, he was released on December 12.
That the track of the terrorist attack was not retained from the outset aroused anger and incomprehension.
“The fact that our associations are being targeted is of a terrorist and political nature,” declared Agit Polat, spokesperson for the CDK-F.
“What we feel is pain and incomprehension because it’s not the first time it’s happened,” said a 23-year-old Parisian protester, Esra, without giving her name.
She was referring to the assassination on January 9, 2013 in Paris of three activists from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has never been elucidated.
In the capital, a gathering of several thousand people was marred by violence and degradation on Saturday. Thirty-one police officers and a demonstrator were slightly injured, 11 people arrested, announced the prefect Nuñez.
An adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan posted photos of overturned and burnt cars in Paris on Twitter on Sunday, writing “it’s the PKK in France”, “the same organization you support in Syria” and “who killed thousands of Turks, Kurds and security forces over the past forty years”.
“Now they are burning the streets of Paris. Are you still going to keep silent?” , asked Ibrahim Kalin.
Hundreds of Syrian Kurds demonstrated again on Sunday in northeastern Syria in tribute to the three “martyrs” killed on Friday.