A year before the attack on rue d’Enghien (10and arrondissement of Paris) on December 23, William M., the alleged killer, had already committed a serious assault against people of foreign origin in Paris. Indicted for these facts, he had been placed in pre-trial detention. He was released on parole on December 12, following the end of the one-year legal term in pre-trial detention for the facts in question. His release had been accompanied by a judicial check that forbade him to possess weapons and forced him to undergo psychiatric treatment.
On December 8, 2021, William M. approached, early in the morning, a migrant camp in the Parc de Bercy, in the 12and neighborhood, pretending to be a jogger. He then he draws a saber shouting: “Death to Migrants” and begins to tear apart the tents in which families sleep. He attacks a urinating man, injuring his back and hip. He then struck a minor, before being strapped in and out of harm’s way by three other camp occupants who used a tree branch to strike him. William M. is slightly wounded in the fight.
The police, called to the scene, questioned all those involved in the violence, including the victims. Even more surprising, four of the five people attacked, with the exception of the minor, were placed in police custody for forty-eight hours. “After their custody, they told us they had not received any treatment or had access to a translator. Apparently, they weren’t even really questioned.”testifies Cloé Chastel, the former nursery manager of the Aurore association, who worked at the camp.
Minutes
While the police ask to collect testimony about the attack from the camp residents, they send a file to the prosecutor’s office, which decides to refer the detainees to an investigating judge for “organized gang violence”. Thanks to the work of the court-appointed lawyers and the reactivity of the associations, the judge understands the situation a little better and decides to release the victims, who are in any case placed in the status of assisted witnesses.
Not only that: during the police detention, ascertaining that one of the attacked people, of Moroccan nationality, does not have a residence permit, the carabinieri alert the prefecture, which issues against him an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF). The document even specifies that the interested party has carried out “intentional violence with a weapon and in an encounter”, while defending himself from a man who tried to kill him with a sword. The OQTF refuses to the defendant any “period of voluntary departure”.
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