One year before the massacre in the rue d’Enghien, William M. had already committed a serious attack against people of foreign origin in Paris. Indicted for these facts, he had been remanded in custody. He was released on parole on December 12, at the end of the legal period of one year of provisional detention for the facts in question. His release had been accompanied by a judicial review prohibiting him from possessing weapons and obliging him to undergo psychiatric treatment.
On December 8, 2021, William M. approached, early in the morning, a migrant camp in Bercy Park, in the 12e borough, pretending to be a jogger. He then drew a sword, yelling: “Death to migrants” and began to tear apart the tents in which families slept. He attacked a man urinating, injuring his back and hip. Then he slashed a minor, before being belted and put out of harm’s way by three other occupants of the camp who had used a tree branch to hit him. William M. was slightly injured in the scuffle.
The police, called to the scene, had arrested all those involved in the violence, including the victims. Even more astonishing, four of the five people attacked, except for the minor, had been placed in police custody for forty-eight hours. “After their custody, they told us that they had received no treatment or had access to a translator. Apparently, they weren’t even really questioned.”testifies Cloé Chastel, the former head of day care for the Aurore association, who worked on the camp.
Victims in police custody, OQTF, fines…
While the police asked the residents of the camp to collect testimonies of the attack, they omitted to question the detainees and, on the contrary, sent a file to the public prosecutor’s office, which decided to refer them to an investigating judge for “organized gang violence”. Thanks to the work of the court-appointed lawyers and the responsiveness of the associations, the judge understands the situation a little better and decides to release the victims, who are however placed under the status of assisted witnesses.
That’s not all: during police custody, the police, noting that one of the people attacked, a Moroccan national, did not have any residence permit, they alerted the prefecture, which issued to his against an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF). The document even specified that the person concerned had engaged in “willful violence with a weapon and in a meeting”, as he defended himself with a branch against a man trying to kill him with a sword. The OQTF refused the respondent any “voluntary departure period”.
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