Following the arrest of a man suspected of fatally stabbing a child worshipper inside a mosque in a southern region, French Muslim leaders have called for further action to combat anti-Muslim sentiment in France. After three days on the run, 21-year-old Olivier A, a Lyon native, turned himself into Italian police on Sunday, according to a Monday morning announcement from French prosecutors.
He is accused of the murder of Aboubakar Cissé, a 22-year-old Malian volunteer at the mosque in La Grand-Combe, southeast France, who had received carpentry training in France.
On Friday morning, Olivier A is accused of breaking into the mosque and stabbing Cissé many times. He is accused of using a cell phone to record his victim in pain. The video shows a guy hurling curses at Allah and praising himself, stating, “I did it.” Early on Friday morning, Cissé had gone to the mosque by himself to worship. When believers started showing up for prayers later that morning, his body was found.
Following the shocking event in the French province, Prime Minister François Bayrou denounced a “Islamophobic” act, and President Emmanuel Macron declared that religious hatred has no place in French society. “The vast majority of Muslims in France believe that anti-Muslim hatred is not taken as seriously as other hate,” Mohammed Moussaoui, the leader of the French Muslim council, told France Info radio.
Muslims were anxious and frightened about the present situation, he added, and he questioned why the case had not been investigated as part of an anti-terrorism investigation. The suspected attacker went to an Italian police station in Florence on Sunday night at about 11.30 p.m. local time (2230 BST), according to state prosecutor Abdelkrim Grini of the southern city of Alès, who spoke to BFMTV. “We knew he had left France,” he claimed. Before long, we were able to capture him. The culprit was forced to turn himself up.
Given the nature of the crime and the fact that a worshipper had been targeted while praying within a mosque, Grini stated that the primary lead in the inquiry was a “anti-Muslim or Islamophobic motive.”
Other aspects of the inquiry, he added, would indicate that the suspect had a “fascination with death,” had desired to murder, and had a desire to “be known as a serial killer.” “My cousin was targeted because he was Muslim,” Aboubakar Cissé’s cousin Ibrahim Cissé told Le Parisien on Sunday.
“It was premeditated, the person knowingly came to kill someone in a mosque,”
he stated, indicating that he believed the incident to be terrorism. We consider Aboubakar to have been the target of a terrorist strike.
According to Agence France-Presse, the suspect’s Italian attorney disputed that his client was driven by anti-Islamic sentiment. Giovanni Salvietti said that he had informed investigators that he had “killed the first person he saw” and that “he has said nothing against Islam, nor mosques.”
It is believed that the suspect resided in La Grande-Combe and was jobless. “He was someone who had stayed under the radar of the police and the justice system,” Grini stated. In remembrance of the victim, around 1,000 people in La Grand-Combe marched silently on Sunday from the Khadidja mosque, the scene of the stabbing, to the town hall.
The rector of a mosque in Nîmes, Abdallah Zekri, condemned the Islamophobic atmosphere in France. On Sunday, several hundred individuals demonstrated against Islamophobia in Paris as well. Macron expressed his solidarity for the family and “to our Muslim compatriots” on social media on Sunday. “Racism and religiously motivated hatred will never be tolerated in France,” he declared. Police have been instructed by the French government to increase security at mosques around the nation.
