For his lawyer, the experts did not detect the disturbing profile of his client. A year after setting the fire, the man killed Father Olivier Maire.
By Charles Guyard
© Estelle Ruiz/Hans Lucas via AFP
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VS’is a slow-moving man, wrapped in a thick red parka, who took his place on Wednesday, December 28 at 3:36 p.m., in the box of the Nantes criminal court. Groomed goatee and well-worn glasses, Emmanuel Abayisenga, who turns 42 on Sunday, looks pretty good for his first public appearance in nearly three years.
In short, according to the consecrated formula, we would gladly give him the Good Lord without confession. The diocese of Nantes, for its part, was above all content to leave him the keys to its main house, in this case the Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul cathedral, where the man who arrived in France in 2012 knew how to become a volunteer who is as active as it is essential.
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For several years, nothing to say, everything went without a hitch. And then, on July 18, 2020, this valued servant lit a fire in the building, causing a violent fire and irreversible damage. Arrested a week later, he recognized everything but explained nothing.
Two psychiatric experts then took care of it. Detecting significant trauma in him linked to his country of origin, Rwanda, and his journey as a migrant, they diagnosed a mental and neurological disorder that had impaired his discernment, but posed no risk to public order and the safety of people.
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On the basis of these conclusions, submitted on March 3, 2021, the former diocesan servant was therefore released under judicial supervision on May 31, and welcomed by the Montfortian missionaries of Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, in Vendée.
On the morning of August 9 of the same year, he presented himself to the local gendarmerie to accuse himself of the murder of Father Olivier Maire, whose body was found covered with bruises. Interned in the process, he spent nearly a year and a half in a specialized unit before being remanded in custody under the classic regime.
Psychiatric second opinion refused
In the light of this dramatic chronology, can we judge the only facts of “deterioration or deterioration of the property of others by a dangerous means” – punishable by ten years in prison – by dissociating them completely from the alleged assassination committed one year later ?
In other words, is the expertise of March 2021 still relevant? “We can pretend not to link these two files,” said Emmanuel Abayisenga’s lawyer, Mr.e Quentin Chabert. But what will be the meaning of having both a sentence in that of the cathedral and a criminal irresponsibility in that of Olivier Maire? »
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Because the defense is formal: the mental state of the forty-year-old, plagued by deep trauma, would not have actually changed between the two events. Nor its dangerousness, whose unique expertise would have been “missed completely” before the crime.
Now, if the latter was tragically mistaken on this crucial point, perhaps it was also mistaken on the rest. In particular on the simply altered and not abolished character – which would make the defendant inaccessible to a criminal sanction – of discernment when lighting the fire.
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If the court did not want to call into question this key element of the case by rejecting the request for a psychiatric counter-expertise, it nevertheless recognized that the current personality of the former volunteer is questionable. As such, the defendant will have to undergo new examinations by March 29 to assess his ability to follow his own trial – for example if the presence of a member of the medical staff will be necessary at the hearing.
The native Rwandan has in any case recognized it: without the antidepressants he takes in prison, he would be invaded by his “delusions”. Was this already the case in July 2020? For his lawyer, it is clear: “The issue is almost exclusively psychiatric. »