A 67-year-old mayor suffered a violent assault in Toulouse during the night from Saturday to Sunday. The investigation is underway to determine the reasons, and in particular to determine whether the homophobic character is to be retained.
A violent assault took place on the night of Saturday 11 to Sunday 12 September 2021 in Toulouse. He is an elected official from Occitania, who suffered a beating next to a place of homosexual meetings. The victim, hospitalized and extremely shocked, could not yet be heard. “The wounds (fractures) testify to the aggression suffered”, indicated the public prosecutor of Toulouse Samuel Vuelta-Simon. According to the Dispatch, the attackers allegedly attacked the victim when he got out of his vehicle, beating him up and stripping him of his clothes, before tying him to a tree and fleeing. The hypothesis of a homophobic attack on this 67-year-old mayor has not been confirmed.
The investigation was entrusted to the departmental security “to locate and question the perpetrators of the aggression who, therefore, have not yet been identified”, explained the prosecutor, specifying that the police had found the vehicle. The place was already in 2018 the scene of other attacks whose homophobic nature had been identified in the past.
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Homophobic or transphobic insults and attacks increased by 36% between 2019 and 2020 in France according to the Ministry of the Interior. In 2020, these acts fell by 15%. The confinements and the health crisis could have weighed on the filing of complaints according to associations. According to the 2020 SOS homophobie report, discrimination is unfortunately still very present. Thus, more than one in ten LGBTQI + young people have already considered leaving school because of difficulties related to their sexual orientation or gender identity, one in four LGBTQI + people has been the victim of at least one assault at work and gay and bisexual people have an average risk of suicide 4 times higher than the general population – a risk that is 7 times higher for trans people.
The mayor received a lot of political support from all sides.