Dominique Bernard, 57, was a French teacher at the Gambetta high school in Arras. Friday October 13, 2023, he was stabbed to death while trying to stop an individual armed with a knife who had entered the courtyard of the establishment. Another teacher and an agent were also injured. Originally from Ingushetia and born in Russia, the suspect, Mohammed M., 20 years old, a former high school student, was on S file and lived in contact with a radicalized family. At the microphone of BFMTV, Sunday October 15, 2023, a neighbor of the attacker explained that she saw the young man transform. “He changed his character, he became very cold. When we said hello to him, he no longer responded”, testified Laurence, a neighbor of the family for ten years. According to her, the 20-year-old young man lived in an atmosphere of brutality, established in particular by a father suspected of domestic violence. “He hit his wife. There were fights on the stairs, he pulled her hair, he kicked her”, she further detailed.
A family consumed by violence
Laurence assured that he tried to intervene within the family, in vain. “I told him to go away, to leave her alone, to stop hitting her. He said to me: ‘but no, it’s not me who hit her, she’s crazy. It’s she who hits herself ‘. Except that I saw the blows, it was he who was giving her.’ Extreme violence in which the young man would have been immersed since childhood, and which would have continued after the expulsion of his father from French territory in 2018, and his return in 2019. “He is still a young person who saw violence with his father. When they were young, the father forced the three boys to fight each other.” And to say that she spoke with the mother, completely distraught. “She explained to me that Mohammed stopped her from eating in the evening after Ramadan, he did not want her to eat. He hit her and forced her to say prayers for four hours on the ground”, she said again. Sunday October 15, the attacker but also several members of his family, including his brothers, sisters and his mother, are still in police custody. In April 2023, his brother, Movsar M., had already been convicted of terrorist conspiracy. For now, the main suspect in this case remains presumed innocent of the charges against him.