Accused of having killed three Kurds on December 23 in Paris, William M. is also suspected of a saber attack on a migrant camp a year earlier in December 2021. A year later, the investigations into this attack “ are still in progress” and the incomprehension of the NGOs which had followed the affair remains.
When this attack occurs in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, on the morning of December 8, the sexagenarian with a troubled profile is already known to justice. Sentenced four years earlier for prohibited possession of weapons, he is also indicted for the stabbing of his burglars in 2016, which earned him a suspended twelve-month prison sentence which he appealed.
long saber
This morning of 2021, it is armed with a long saber that he bursts into the gardens of Bercy in Paris, where migrants in need of accommodation have set up camp. “It was a park where we had installed exiled families and as each time the camp had grown,” recalls Nikolai Pozner, from the Utopia56 association, to AFP. “Single men had settled a little further away thinking that the presence of families would bring them a form of security”.
However, it was them that William M. allegedly attacked that morning, tearing down several tents and injuring two migrants, one of them seriously, before being overpowered by other occupants of the camp.
Migrants in custody
“He had pretended to be jogging and suddenly pulled out a saber. Through the tents, he touched several people and attacked a person who was peeing standing up, hitting her on the back and on the hip, ”reports Cloé Chastel, who was then an official of the Aurore association. and collected numerous testimonies.
Shortly after the attack, the security forces intervened and arrested the assailant and four migrants, including one of the injured. All will be placed in police custody for forty-eight hours.
“At first, we can understand that we had to challenge the people who were taking part in what looked like a brawl, but the second phase was missed when we tried to understand,” said Mr. Pozner, saying that the migrants did not were assisted by no interpreter.
An obligation to leave the territory for a witness
The prosecution will change its analysis. If the preliminary investigation is opened on the day of the facts for “attempted intentional homicide”, the judicial information which succeeds it two days later targets “violence with a weapon, premeditation and of a racist nature”.
It is under this charge, less serious, that William M. is indicted on December 10 and placed in pre-trial detention. The four migrants arrested alongside him are placed under the intermediate status of assisted witness and one of them, an undocumented Moroccan, is then notified of an obligation to leave French territory, to the chagrin of NGOs. .
Verbalizations the next day
Another episode will cause their excitement. The day after the attack, associations gather at Parc de Bercy in support of migrants who are still traumatized. They then see the police arriving and surrounding them and will issue several of them with fines for “participating in a prohibited demonstration on the public highway”.
“The response we expected, a little naively, was that we were sent social workers, psychologists and we were sent police officers,” says Paul Alauzy, of Doctors of the World, who was on the spot. that evening and was taken, “howling siren”, to the police station where he was released an hour later.
It was at the end of the maximum period of his pre-trial detention that William M. was released on December 12 under judicial supervision, with in particular the prohibition to hold a weapon.