In particular, the investigation will have to establish whether the suspect premeditated his act and whether he acted in the name of an ideology. His psychological state, compatible with police custody, remains a central question.
For what did the assailant attack passers-by in a park in Annecy (Haute-Savoie), injuring six people, including four very young children? The police custody of the suspect, Abdalmasih H., was extended on Friday June 9, and the investigation is continuing under the aegis of the Annecy prosecutor’s office. At this stage, the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office has not taken up this attack, which has not “no apparent terrorist motive”in the words of the city attorney.
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Whether it is retained or not, the terrorist qualification is often a sensitive subject after acts that arouse strong emotion, and in the face of complex profiles like that of this Syrian Christian, asylum seeker rejected in France, of whom witnesses tell wandering in Annecy the previous weeks, and who shouted “in the name of Jesus Christ” during the attack. “There is no clear line” between what is or is not terrorism, sums up to franceinfo Olivier Cahn, lecturer in private law and criminal sciences at the University of Cergy (Val-d’Oise) and researcher in a CNRS laboratory.
The will to sow terror, a central criterion
However, there are legal criteria, defined by article 421-1 of the Penal Code. A whole series of acts, including “deliberate attacks on life” can be considered terrorists if they are “intentionally in connection with an individual or collective enterprise aimed at seriously disturbing public order by intimidation or terror”.
“The first question to ask yourself” is related to the term“business”explains Olivier Cahn: this means “that there must be premeditation”. The investigation should determine whether there was a time interval “between the decision and the passage to the act” of the assailant, and if this time was used for him to prepare his act, for example by buying a weapon. A question that the elements of the investigation made public so far do not make it possible to establish in the case of the Annecy attack.
After such a tragedy, public order is obviously disturbed. But in order to qualify as “terrorist” under the Penal Code, an act must have “for goal” to create terror. This is where the difficult assessment of the suspect’s motivation comes into play. Among the elements, justice is attentive to “the ideology in the name of which the act appears to have been perpetrated” and at “social context”explains Olivier Cahn. “The fact that a suspect is part of the global jihad or the proletarian revolution helps in qualification”, analyzes the researcher. And all the more so if the doctrine of the suspect “advocates terrorism as one of the means”.
The psychiatric state of the suspect will be decisive
The fact that the suspect of the Annecy attack mentions Jesus Christ during his act is not necessarily of the same spring, observes Olivier Cahn, because “there is no Christian project of resorting to terror to advance a political project” in the French context. It is in any case this context that justice will have to assess.
“The invocation of Jesus Christ can rather make one think of a psychosis”observes the lawyer, which introduces another question, that of the psychological state of the suspect and his criminal responsibility. “If he has no free will at the time of his act”, all the other elements allowing him to be qualified as a terrorist no longer matter, and the author cannot be judged. A first psychiatric expertise, conducted on Friday, concluded that the condition of the Annecy suspect was compatible with police custody, without deciding the question of criminal responsibility.
A final criterion can weigh in the decision of the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office to seize or not, analyzes Olivier Cahn: “the management of its resources”. Well endowed, this specialized prosecutor’s office created in 2019 has nevertheless “a lot of work”. Seizing a case requires appointing an investigating judge and conducting an investigation. “If he dedicates himself to files which have a strong chance of not going to the end, because the suspect risks being judged irresponsible criminally, it is a waste of means” who can encourage him not to take this risk, he believes.
But these considerations may conflict with the expectations of part of public opinion, as reactions to a similar decision showed after the killings at a Kurdish cultural center in Paris in December. If the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office confirms its position, and the terrorist qualification is not retained against the suspect of the Annecy attack, “he will have to explain why”concludes Olivier Cahn.