A young French admirer of Hitler, suspected of planning a mass killing, was indicted on Friday for “individual terrorist enterprise” and placed in pre-trial detention, we learned on Saturday from sources close to the case.
Aged 20, the young man was spotted on social networks and encrypted messaging under the pseudonym “HeinrichHimmler88”, explained a source familiar with the matter to AFP, confirming information from the daily, Le Parisien.
He poured out neo-Nazi remarks there, threatening in videos to attack “Jews, blacks, women, the LGBT community”, added this source.
Heinrich Himmler was one of the main dignitaries of the Third Reich, leader of the SS, and the number 88 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet H, for the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler”.
The man was arrested Tuesday in the department of Ardèche (south) by investigators from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) who had established that he was “looking for a weapon”, suggesting to imminent action.
If he assumed in police custody his admiration for Nazi ideology, he “denied wanting to use a weapon” to commit a killing, according to the source familiar with the matter.
Asked by AFP, his lawyers did not wish to speak.
“It’s an unstable profile, with a lot of resentment towards several groups of people who allegedly mistreated him when he was younger”, develops the close source.
Since 2017, eight plans for attacks attributed to the far right have been thwarted in France and a dozen procedures related to this movement have been opened at the Paris anti-terrorism center.
It is a threat “taken very seriously” and which “is growing in power”, according to a Parisian anti-terrorism magistrate.