An expert concluded that his discernment was not impaired at the time of the events and that he was in good condition to be tried. An individual with a particularly worrying profile will have to respond this Wednesday afternoon, before the correctional chamber of the Nice judicial court, to repeated death threats he has made online against the mayor of the fifth largest city in France, Christian Estrosi.
Arrested on February 23, this 37-year-old man, “already known to justice”, according to the public prosecutor Xavier Bonhomme, was placed in pre-trial detention two days later. He is being prosecuted for “threat of death or damage to property dangerous for people against an elected official”, “public apology for a crime or misdemeanor” and “dissemination, by electronic communications network, of processes allowing the manufacture of destruction devices.
Child crime and detonators
The facts retained in the procedure were committed from February 1 to 23, even if the first reports had been brought to the attention of justice at the end of last year. Hateful posts against the elected official, including accusations of child crime, had started to be posted on Instagram, via an account open to the public followed by more than 50,000 subscribers, according to a source familiar with the matter. The man explained there to hold very compromising videos of the elected official, specifying that his ex-wife and his wife were aware.
The 30-year-old then threatened to blow up buildings in Nice, and also to blow up eight other major cities in France. The affair was taken all the more seriously as some of his publications began to be accompanied by instructions for making detonators. In another post, he also said he wanted to trap a chair with a bomb and seat the mayor of Nice there.
Faced with the investigators, his motives would have remained particularly vague. The individual evoking some form of humor. Requested by 20 minutes Tuesday, his lawyer did not respond. Christian Estrosi’s entourage and his advisers also did not wish to comment before the trial.