Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin estimated Monday that there had been “obviously a failure” in the “psychiatric” follow-up of the radical Islamist, author of the fatal knife attack near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday evening in Paris. “There was clearly a psychiatric failure, the doctors considered on several occasions that he was better,” said Gérald Darmanin on BFMTV about Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a 26-year-old Franco-Iranian radicalized since 2015 and subjected to an injunction for psychiatric care after serving a four-year prison sentence for a planned violent action in 2016.
A failure “not in the monitoring of the intelligence services but clearly psychiatric”
“He was followed judicially and thanks to this follow-up, the psychiatrist was able to again order treatment because he clearly has a very pronounced mental illness. And once we have finished that, the prison sentence and the judicial and psychiatric follow-up, there was clearly a failure, not in the follow-up of the intelligence services but (…) clearly psychiatric”, estimated Gérald Darmanin. According to the Minister of the Interior, “the doctors on several occasions considered that he was doing better, that he was more normal and that he could live, if I dare say, freely.”
Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab killed a 23-year-old German-Filipino tourist with a knife and hammer on Saturday evening and lightly injured two other men, a 60-year-old Frenchman and a 66-year-old British man. He was arrested immediately after the events and has since been in police custody in the premises of the anti-terrorist section (SAT) of the Paris criminal brigade. “There is someone mentally ill, who no longer takes medication to treat his delusions and who undoubtedly acts out. We must think about all of this to protect the French,” insisted the Minister of the Interior .
A report from his mother last October
Anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard told the press on Sunday evening that the author of the attack, listed for Islamist radicalization (FSPRT), was “subject to a treatment order involving tight psychiatric monitoring and controlled by a coordinating doctor “until the end of the probation on April 26, 2023, after a new psychiatric assessment. This new expertise had been requested by the Pnat in view of “the evolution of certain psychiatric disorders already noted during his detention”, specified Ricard.
The terrorist’s mother had reported at the end of October her concern about the behavior of her son, who “was closing in on himself”, according to the prosecutor. The police then tried to have him examined by a doctor and hospitalized, something ultimately impossible in the absence of problems, according to a source close to the case at AFP. His mother, moreover, did not want to request his forced hospitalization. A few days after his report, she assured that he was “doing better”, again according to the same source.