He had tried to slit the gardener’s throat by calling him a “dirty jerk” in Villecresnes (Val-de-Marne). A septuagenarian was sentenced Monday in Créteil to a one-year prison sentence which he will serve under an electronic bracelet, found guilty of intentional violence due to race, ethnicity or religion, damage and racist insults.
He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, three of which were suspended for two years, in accordance with the prosecution’s requisitions. He will also have to pay 5,000 euros to the victim.
On November 17, 2023, Mourad, a 29-year-old gardener, was working in Villecresnes with two colleagues when a man arrived by car. According to a video shown at the hearing, the defendant honked his horn three times. The septuagenarian comes out armed with a box cutter, explains the judge, and utters racist insults several times: “Bugnoules, I’m at home”.
Staples and stitches
Mourad films the scene and approaches the septuagenarian. After several attempts, the latter hits him in the chin with a cutter. “They sewed me up, I had staples, 76 stitches,” the young man told the audience, very moved, adding: “He is 76 years old, the age of my grandmother, I never said to myself that he would have used a cutter.”
“I regret a gesture of anger, I would like to apologize,” said the defendant, blue mask on his face. In her defense, Me Caroline Gerbaud assured that filming the scene could have made the situation worse. The defendant reported his “many health problems”, mentioning “two cancers in remission”.
Question of racism
The question of racism was at the heart of the debates. “What does a bougnoule mean? », asked the judge of the septuagenarian. “A North African,” he finally replied, after several reminders. “Sir, are you racist? », asked an assessor. “Not at all,” he assured.
The defendant is “factual, he is racist”, ruled the victim’s lawyer, Me Mourad Battikh, for whom “he is also the victim of this ideology, before being its armed wing”. He hails a “victory” with the addition of the aggravating circumstance for racism.