According to his lawyer, the experts did not reveal the disturbing profile of his client. A year after starting the fire, the man killed Father Olivier Maire.
Par Charles Guyard
© Estelle Ruiz/Hans Lucas via AFP
Published on
– Changed
therehe is a man with slow movements, wrapped in a thick red parka, who took his place on Wednesday 28 December at 3.36 pm, in the box of the criminal court of Nantes. A well-groomed goatee and worn glasses, Emmanuel Abayisenga, who turns 42 on Sunday, looks good for his first public appearance in nearly three years.
In short, according to the consecrated formula, we would gladly give him the Good Lord without confession. The diocese of Nantes, for his part, contented itself above all with leaving him the keys to his main house, in this case the cathedral of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, where the man who arrived in France in 2012 learned become a volunteer as active as indispensable.
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For several years, nothing to say, everything went smoothly. And then, on July 18, 2020, this valiant servant started a fire in the building, resulting in a massive fire and irreversible damage. Arrested a week later, he acknowledged everything but didn’t explain anything.
Two psychiatric experts then took care of it. Noting in him a significant trauma linked to his country of origin, Rwanda, and his journey as a migrant, they diagnosed a mental and neurological disorder that had compromised his discernment, but did not represent a risk to public order and safety of people.
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On the basis of these conclusions, presented on March 3, 2021, the former diocesan servant was then released on probation on May 31, and welcomed by the Montfortian missionaries of Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, in the Vendée.
On the morning of August 9 of the same year, he presented himself to the local gendarmerie to accuse himself of the murder of Father Olivier Maire, whose body was found covered in bruises. Interned in the trial, he spent almost a year and a half in a specialized department before being placed in pre-trial detention under the classic regime.
Psychiatric second opinion refused
In the light of this dramatic chronology, can the facts of “deterioration or deterioration of the property of others by dangerous means” – punishable by ten years’ imprisonment – be judged completely dissociated from the alleged murder committed a year later?
In other words, is the March 2021 expertise still relevant? “We can pretend not to connect these two files,” said Emmanuel Abayisenga’s attorney, Mr.and Quentin Chabert. But what is the point of having both a conviction in that of the cathedral and a criminal irresponsibility in that of Olivier Maire? »
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Because the defense is formal: the mental state of the forty-year-old, afflicted by profound traumas, would not have actually changed between the two events. Nor the dangerousness of him, whose singular expertise would have been “completely lacking” before the crime.
Now, if the latter was tragically wrong on this crucial point, perhaps he was also wrong on the rest. In particular on the simply altered and not abolished character – which would make the defendant inaccessible to penal sanction – of the discernment in lighting the fire.
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If the court did not want to question this key element of the file by rejecting the request for a psychiatric cross-examination, it nevertheless recognized that the current personality of the former volunteer is questionable. Therefore, the defendant will have to undergo new tests by 29 March to assess his ability to follow his trial, for example if a member of medical staff will be required to be present at the hearing.
However, the Rwandan native acknowledged it: without the antidepressants he takes in prison, he would be invaded by his “delusions”. Was this already the case in July 2020? For his lawyer it is clear: “The question is almost exclusively psychiatric. »
