Ln December 8, 2021, in the early morning, William Malet, 68, entered a refugee camp on the 12e arrondissement of Paris, at the foot of the Accor Arena in Bercy. Armed with a sword, shouting: “Death to migrants! he slashed several tents occupied by families before rushing on a man of Sudanese origin, the tip of his sword forward, seriously injuring him in the hip and back; then he goes after an Eritrean miner, hitting him with his blade before being overpowered by three occupants of the camp.
As told The world, the author, but also his adult victim and those who rescued him, were all placed in police custody, the prosecution putting everyone in the same bag under the qualification of “violence in an organized gang”. Fortunately, the court-appointed lawyers did their job well, providing the investigating judge with the elements enabling him to separate the wheat from the chaff, the victims and their attacker. In the end, William Malet was the only one to be prosecuted in what justice has, however, equated to a simple aggression, a vulgar brawl. Indicted for “aggravated violence”, Malet was placed on December 10, 2021 in pre-trial detention and imprisoned in the Health Remand Prison.
The “intention” in question
To misqualify an offense is to expose oneself to serious disappointments, one might say, paraphrasing Camus. Did the man with the sword intend to kill? At the very least, did he risk doing so by acting as he did in this makeshift camp? No, replied the justice, which “disqualified” his act by only holding against him violence (on a minor and under the threat of a weapon), punishable by seven years’ imprisonment, dismissing attempted murder, punishable thirty years of criminal imprisonment.READ ALSO Rue d’Enghien, the Kurds struck in the heart
William Malet was released on December 12, in this case which has still not been judged. As explained by the prosecution, when the person concerned will take action again, eleven days later, the maximum period of pre-trial detention, for the offense in question, was set at one year. The judge therefore had no choice but to put him back outside… If the attack on the Bercy camp – which could have led to the death of one of its occupants – had received a criminal qualification, the former railway worker would have been able to remain in prison while waiting to be determined on his fate, the legal period of pre-trial detention increasing to three years, for an attempted homicide. Instead, he was released, under judicial supervision, with the obligation to receive psychiatric care and the prohibition to carry a weapon. Who to make sure? This is another story…
An impressive arsenal
The assessment that justice has made of this saber attack is all the more surprising since William Malet was not at his first attempt. In June 2022, he was sentenced to one year in prison for acts of “violence with weapons” committed in 2016 at his home in Livry-Gargan (Seine-Saint-Denis). That year, on the night of February 26 to 27, the sexagenarian had surprised three burglars in the middle of the night – including a minor – at his home. Arming himself with a knife, he had seriously wounded two of them, in the neck and in the face, the third having managed to escape. Justice did not recognize the benefit of self-defense, considering the response as disproportionate. Above all, the police discovered at his home, on this occasion, an impressive arsenal equipped with about thirty weapons, including several assault rifles, weapons of war and handguns locked in a trunk. Sentenced last summer for these facts to one year in prison, William Malet had appealed. This appeal being suspensive, his sentence had not been enforced.
Since this episode, as we know, Malet has been brooding over his revenge, nourishing, as he declared last Friday in police custody, a “hatred of foreigners that has become completely pathological” which, according to his father, has made him ” crazy”.
On December 23, only a few days after seeing the light of day again, he took action again. He walks to the Ahmet-Kaya cultural center, headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Center, at 16 rue d’Enghien, in the 10e district of Paris. Armed with a Colt 45 and plenty of ammunition, he first fired at a woman and two men, before rushing to a Kurdish barber, 150 meters away, where he fired again. Result: three dead and three wounded.
The Paris prosecutor’s office, as we know, rejected the terrorist qualification which would have forced him to divest in favor of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat), the only competent authority in the matter. Williazm Malet will be prosecuted for racist murder. A decision that continues to arouse anger and misunderstanding in the Kurdish community in France.
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“Nothing allows at this stage to accredit any affiliation [du mis en cause] to an extremist ideological movement”, explained Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, only a few hours after the facts. “No one knows him to have any particular interest in the situation of the Kurds”, she justified again two days later. “The documentation seized does not reveal any link with an extremist ideology,” she insisted after the search carried out at the home of William Malet. This one, however, “knew the neighborhood”; he “knew” where the Kurdish center was, which he targeted before taking action. During one of his interrogations, he indicated precisely “resent the Kurds”, guilty in his eyes of having “constituted prisoners during their fight against Daesh, instead of killing them”.
quibbles
Why, therefore, did you not retain the terrorist act, even if it meant abandoning it during the investigation? Kept away, the Pnat is sticking, for the time being, to subtle – and questionable – legal quibbles, distinguishing the goal from the consequences of taking action. “Terrorist acts are intentionally aimed at seriously disturbing public order through intimidation or terror. It is not the direct consequences of the act that must be analysed, but the intention of its author, the goal he has pursued. An act can seriously disturb public order without the author having had this intention. It is therefore necessary to analyze precisely the elements collected during the investigation to assess what the intention of the defendant was at the time of the facts, to determine for what purpose he acted, “explained at the beginning of the week to the Point the duty magistrate at the Pnat.
Thus, by targeting and killing several people from the Kurdish community at the same time, William Malet did not “intend” to sow “terror” and “seriously disturb public order”. He only wanted to kill. Similarly, by rushing a year earlier saber in hand on the occupants of a migrant camp, his “intention” was not to sow death but to exercise violence… So decided the judicial authority .