This Friday, December 23, 2022, near a Kurdish community center in the tenth arrondissement of the capital, a man released from prison for a racist attack killed three people and injured three others with a firearm.
What are the shooter’s motivations? This is the question that investigators have been trying to answer since Friday. after this tragedy which took place in the heart of Parisrue d’Enghien in the 10th arrondissement.
Because the day after this deadly shooting near a Kurdish community center, the shock is immense and the questions many
What happened on rue d’Enghien?
Shortly before noon Friday, a man opened fire on the public road. If initially the authorities first reported “several injuries”, the toll quickly worsened to reach three dead (one woman and two men) and three injured, including one in absolute emergency. Victims who are all of Kurdish nationality.
“We heard five shots coming from 50, 100 meters, then we saw a person in his sixties who took a pistol out of his small bag and started shooting towards our house” , a witness told BFM TV.
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According to the first elements of the investigation, the shooter opened fire in the Kurdish Cultural Center Ahmet-Kaya, before targeting a restaurant and a hairdressing salon located nearby. It was in this trade that his murderous journey ended, with his arrest by the police.
What is the profile of the shooter?
Aged 69, this former railway worker of French nationality, who was taken into custody, is known to the courts. He has already been sentenced last June to twelve months in prison for acts of violence with a weapon committed in 2016.
Above all, on December 13, 2021, the alleged shooter was indicted in another case, for violence with a weapon and of a racist nature. A few days earlier, he had indeed attacked a migrant camp in Paris using a saber.
For these facts, he had been remanded in custody. But on December 12, the man was released “and placed under judicial supervision at the end of the maximum period of provisional detention of one year provided for by law”explains the prosecution.
A racist attack?
Very quickly after the events, several elected officials, mainly from the left, denounced a “racist attack” attributed to a “far right activist”.
If Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, clarified during his visit to the scene of the tragedy that the man was not known to the intelligence services to be affiliated with “an extremist ideological movement”, his motivations are obviously at the heart of the debates and the investigation opened for “counts of assassination, intentional homicides and aggravated violence”
The Kurds of France have been the target of a heinous attack in the heart of Paris. Thoughts to the victims, to the people who are struggling to live, to their families and loved ones. Recognition to our law enforcement for their courage and composure.
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 23, 2022
And while Emmanuel Macron came to declare on Twitter that “the Kurds of France were the target of a heinous attack in the heart of Paris”, overflows broke out at the scene of the killing.
At the end of the day, members of the Kurdish community, sometimes violently, denounced the failure of the French state to protect them, against a backdrop of regular tensions with Turkey. Charges that come almost ten years to the day after the assassination, already in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, of three Kurdish activists, attributed to the Turkish secret services.
