A 24-year-old man was sentenced to six months in prison for carrying a prohibited weapon this Monday for immediate appearance before the Criminal Court of Versailles (Yvelines). This man is the one who was arrested on Friday in possession of a kitchen knife, near a high school in Limaya few hours after the assassination of a professor in Arras by a young Russian named S.
His lawyer, Me Chloé Rueff, announced that he wanted to appeal this and request his release. The public prosecutor had requested a firm eight months with a committal warrant during the hearing in immediate appearance, an indictment justified by “the serious national context”, despite “a common law offense”, and the personality described as “worrying” of the warned.
An argument contested by Chloé Rueff: her client is certainly “anxious” but is not a “radicalized young person”, she argued. If he explained that he was “lonely”, “he said that he tries not to fall into the traps of certain people: he wants to learn Arabic to understand, he is finding out” about religion. Investigators found Arabic and religious books at his home, which they described as “Salafist”, which the lawyer disputes.
During the hearing, the young man admitted to having a knife in his bag, found on the ground a few days before. On the facts, he explained to the court that he was leaving the mosque, located near the Condorcet high school in Limay, and that he was going to the supermarket to do some shopping. He denied following a group of high school girls.
Police sources told AFP on Friday that the defendant was known for “radicalization”. One of them clarified on Saturday that the man was the subject of an S file, which was not mentioned during the hearing.
Macron referred to his arrest
His arrest took place approximately four hours after Mohammed Mogouchkov, a 20-year-old Russian accused of radicalization, killed a teacher with a knife and injured three people in a middle school in Arras. While traveling in this establishment, the president Emmanuel Macron had mentioned another foiled “attack attempt”, “in another region”. He was referring, according to the Interior Ministry, to the arrest of Limay. But, questioned at the bar about his presence in Telegram channels where videos of abuses by the Islamic State group are broadcast, the defendant declared “to condemn these events: it shocks me”.
Chloé Rueff denounced an “artificial”, “constructed” case, which “has nothing to do with a foiled attack”.