Colombes – No abolition of discernment and an explicit letter of allegiance to the EI group: a little less than 24 hours after a motorist violently struck three police officers in Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine), the anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office decided to take up the investigation.
In this letter, found with a knife in his BMW car, Youssef T., a resident of this city in the outskirts of Paris, aged 29, explains that he launched “head on in the battle to impose sharia law on the whole of Earth”.
This letter, the choice to target the police and a brief hearing of the suspect Monday evening quickly directed the investigation of the Nanterre prosecution towards a possible terrorist motive. But the first confused statements by Youssef T., who said he wanted to “die by killing the police” according to a source close to the file, suspended the decision to the results of a psychiatric examination.
The expert, who met with the suspect on Tuesday morning, concluded “there has been no abolition or deterioration in the judgment of the defendant”, announced in the afternoon the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) in a statement.
Consequently, the Pnat “decided to seize these facts, opening an investigation of the counts of attempted assassinations on persons depositaries of the public authority in relation to a terrorist enterprise and association of criminal criminal criminals”.
Police custody of the suspect, who has so far been unknown to the intelligence services, continued on Tuesday afternoon.
The facts took place Monday, “around 17h-17h15” to a “road control device associating two motor vehicles of the municipal police and two bikers of the national police, near the Yves-du-Manoir stadium.
The suspect, aboard a black BMW then deported to them before hitting them violently, seriously wounding the legs of two officials of the national police and, more slightly, a municipal policeman.
The two bikers suffered multiple leg fractures. The first, more seriously injured, especially in the head, was placed in an artificial coma and operated overnight at the Beaujon de Clichy hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), according to a police source.
The second, who suffers from a fracture of the two fibulae, is treated at Percy de Clamart hospital, still in western Paris.
The suspect has no recent criminal record and was “not on file S” for radicalization, according to Pnat.
Known for “old common law facts”, he was the subject of a legal reminder for contempt of agent in 2014, Nanterre prosecutor Catherine Denis told AFP.
– “A guy like any other” –
“He has been living here for four years and we have never had any problem with him,” said AFP, on condition of anonymity, a neighbor of the suspect.
“He was not a guy hanging around in the neighborhood,” added in unison several residents of the city interviewed by AFP.
“He was quiet, I knew him from afar. I chatted with him from time to time. He is a guy like any other,” says a neighborhood thirties who said that Youssef T. very occasionally frequented the old prayer hall.
For the time being, the investigators will seek to determine whether it is an express or undetected radicalization, against a background of psychological instability. They will also have to establish whether Youssef T. benefited from complicity in the implementation of his attack or at least in his ideological preparation.
The investigations are coordinated by the criminal brigade, now with the support of the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI).
This incident comes in the context of recent tensions with the police in this western Paris department and while France has been living under the constant threat of jihadist attacks since 2015, which have left 258 dead in total.
Since the beginning of the year, the anti-terrorist justice has seized two attacks, in the two cases perpetrated by men whose psychiatric profile raises questions.
On January 3 in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), a young man converted to Islam and suffering from psychiatric disorders had attacked walkers with a knife, leaving one dead and two injured, before being shot by police.
The anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office also took up the knife attack of April 4 in Romans-sur-Isère (Drôme). Abdallah Ahmed-Osman, a 33-year-old Sudanese refugee with confused statements, stabbed several passers-by that day, killing two and injuring five.
meh-grd-bl-adm / epe / or
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