A point that will prove decisive in the instruction to come. According to the conclusions of a psychiatric expert’s report revealed by our colleagues from the Parisian this Thursday, William Malet’s discernment was, “to some extent”, impaired when he shot and killed three Kurds in December in Paris.
“His psychiatric examination does not reveal an evolving or constituted mental illness” but “reveals personality disorders in a register of paranoia of character”, according to the two psychiatrists who examined him on January 4th.
“Pathological” hatred of foreigners
The two experts consider that these personality disorders justify “to a certain extent, that one considers his discernment as having been altered”.
On December 23, William Malet, a 69-year-old retired train driver, opened fire near the Kurdish cultural center on rue d’Enghien (10th arrondissement of Paris), killing three and injuring three. Indicted for racist murder and attempted murder, he was imprisoned.
In police custody, he had admitted his “pathological” hatred of foreigners. He was released from prison on December 12 after a year in pre-trial detention for having injured migrants with a sword in a Paris camp in December 2021.
Sentenced multiple times
At the time of the facts rue d’Enghien, he was in “a situational impasse, an experience of existential failure, after a rocking during the burglary of his pavilion” in 2016, according to the conclusions.
Sentenced in June 2022 for violence with weapons for having injured his burglars, he appealed. “Feeling helpless (…) he conceived the racist idea of a mass killing followed by suicide as a restorative, vengeful solution, revealing to the world his own suffering, in a massacre perpetrated against those who, according to him, threatened him and which, in his vision, threaten the world”, write the psychiatrists.
Responsible for his actions according to the Kurds of France
“We tried to portray a depressed individual who did not have all his faculties” but “he is responsible for his actions”, underlined Berivan Firat, spokesperson for the Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F), part civil, during a press conference.
Maître Christian Charrière-Bournazel, one of the CDK-F lawyers, asked the three investigating judges to explore all avenues “to find out how he could have been mandated or influenced in a very decisive way by agents of the current Turkish government which has only one obsession, it is to reduce the Kurds”.
“We have the feeling that only one track is currently being studied”, that of “a lone wolf who commits an isolated attack”, regretted Agit Polat, another spokesperson for the CDK-F. However, William Malet “comes precisely to target the Kurdish center”, he recalled, who sees in it “a political motivation”.