Two of the eleven people taken into custody were released on Sunday. For now, the main suspect, Mohammed M., “claims nothing and explains nothing”.
A suspect who acted “alone”with “premeditation”but who “claims nothing and explains nothing”. The investigation into the terrorist attack committed on Friday October 13 at the Gambetta-Carnot high school in Arras (Pas-de-Calais) is progressing. Nine of the eleven people arrested are still in custody at the Anti-Terrorist Sub-Directorate of the Judicial Police (Sdat) and at the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), France Télévisions learned on Sunday from a police source. Here is what we know, for the moment, about this investigation.
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The suspect “refuses to provide the slightest element” of response
Since his arrest on Friday, Mohammed M. “claims nothing and explains nothing”, notes the same police source. “He is provocative with the police”with formulas like “it’s for you to guess” when asked a question, and “refuses to provide the slightest element”.
The investigators’ first investigations show “a family still under the control of the father”, although he was deported in 2018 and is now in Georgia. “He calls often”, note the police, who add that Mohammed M. “saw himself as the head of the family and beat his mother”. The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, also declared that the suspect in the Arras attack had “experienced custody for domestic violence”, “when he attacked his mother”.
Mohammed M.’s former teachers present him as a “good student” and he has a “good level of religious knowledge”, reported to France Télévisions the same police source. Martin Dousseau, teacher at the Gambetta high school in Arras, who faced the attacker on Friday, told franceinfo that there had been, in the young man, “signs of radicalization which arrived, little by little”. The investigation also shows that Mohammed M. “rejects all the values of the Republic”, clear sign of his radicalization.
For investigators, the young man “acted alone” and premeditated his action by returning to strike at his old high school, even if they think that the killed teacher, Dominique Bernard, “was not specifically the target.” Several witnesses also confirmed having heard the suspect shout “God is great”, “Many times”. One of them assured that Mohammed M. first sought to hit a history teacher.
Two police custody lifted
Two of the eleven police custody have been lifted at this stage. These are two Belarusians, who “had been checked the day before with the perpetrator of the attack and arrested on the day of the attack”. They had hired Mohammed M. as “translator in the context of contract negotiation”, according to investigators.
Among those still in police custody are the main suspect, Mohammed M., his two brothers, his mother, his sister, his uncle and a detainee with whom the alleged perpetrator of the attack had spoken a few days earlier.
The family circle at the center of the investigations
The suspect’s older brother, aged 22, was sentenced to five years in prison in April for failing to report a planned attack of which he was aware. According to information from franceinfo, he was arrested in the summer of 2019 by the DGSI, when he was a minor, as part of this foiled attack plan targeting the surroundings of the Elysée Palace, the police on duty and civilians. This is a “particularly virulent radicalized young person on social networks”, according to anti-terrorism magistrates. He is still incarcerated to this day and was taken from his cell at La Santé prison to answer questions from investigators.
The attacker’s little brother, arrested at the same time as him, “is also very radicalized”, specifies the same police source to France Télévisions. He was arrested in front of his school, while he was on his bike. Investigators placed him in custody to ensure that“he didn’t know anything”.
A father listed as expelled in 2018
Mohammed M., 20, was born in Ingushetia, a Republic of the Russian Federation neighboring Chechnya and with a Muslim majority. He arrived in France in 2008, at the age of 5, with his parents and four brothers and sisters. His family first settled near Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine), where the children went to school. The family was then subject to a collective expulsion procedure to Moscow at the beginning of 2014. But associations mobilized against this decision and the prefecture reversed course, the expulsion procedure not respecting the framework of ‘circular.
>> Not deportable, in an irregular situation: we explain the status of the main suspect in the Arras attack
When Mohammed M. arrived in Arras in 2015, he was 12 years old. His father, file S, “was a supporter of radical Islam”, explained the Minister of the Interior on Saturday. He was expelled in 2018, Gérald Darmanin said on Friday evening. Until he reached the age of majority, the attacker therefore lived legally on French territory. Because in France, no minor can be subject to expulsion. At the age of 18, in 2021, the young man applied for asylum, in order to regularize his situation. But the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), as well as the National Court of Asylum (CNDA), refused him, as confirmed by a police source to franceinfo, without specifying the reasons for this end of non-receipt.
The suspect had been under surveillance since this summer
Mohammed M. had no criminal record, but was monitored by the DGSI “since the end of July”, according to Gérald Darmanin, thanks to wiretapping and physical surveillance measures. This monitoring was implemented “because there were links” between him and his detained brother, the Minister of the Interior explained on Saturday.
He was checked on Thursday, the day before the attack, without any offense being held against him. This control was intended to verify “if he did not have weapons on him, but also to carry out more intrusive intelligence techniques and in particular access his phone and the encrypted messages on his phone”according to the Minister of the Interior.
According to a security source at France Télévisions, his telephone conversations did not give rise to fears of imminent action. There is no “there was no failure of the intelligence services”assured Gérald Darmanin. “Nothing in the information that we were able to obtain made it possible to predict that this individual (…) could carry out the act”added Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on Sunday in La Tribune Sunday. “What more could be done in this case? Should the unpredictable be expected?”launched Sunday on France Inter the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti.