The Frenchman arrested for killing three Kurds in Paris last week has told investigators he had a “pathological” hatred of foreigners, the city’s prosecutor said Sunday.
The 69-year-old man was arrested on Friday after he shot dead two men and a woman at a Kurdish cultural center and a Kurdish cafe near Paris’ 10th district, in what French President Emmanuel Macron called an attack “vile” on the Kurds of France.
The killings shocked France and shocked the Kurdish community, which was preparing to mark the 10th anniversary of the unsolved killing of three activists in 2013. Thousands took to the streets of France in demonstrations this weekend to complaining about the lack of security and claiming that the French security services did too little to prevent the shooting. The Paris protests saw clashes between some protesters and the police.
The suspect said during questioning that, since a robbery at his home in 2016, he had felt “a hatred of foreigners that became completely pathological,” prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement. Since then he wanted to kill migrants or non-European foreigners.
The man described himself as “depressed” and with “suicidal tendencies”, and explained that he had planned to kill himself with one last bullet after his attack, the prosecutor said.
The man told investigators he had first traveled to the city of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, armed with a gun and looking for foreigners to “kill”. He gave up on this idea because there were few people and his clothes had made it difficult for him to reload the gun.
He finally decided to head to Rue d’Enghien in the 10th arrondissement of Paris because he knew there was a Kurdish cultural center there. When he reached the center, he opened fire.
A search of the suspect’s parents’ home, where he lived, found no evidence of any links to extremist ideology, the Paris prosecutor said.
Kurdish representatives have called for Friday’s shooting to be considered a terrorist attack. The prosecutor said the questioning of the man was stopped on Saturday because of his health and he was transferred to a psychiatric unit.
The man has been described by French media as a former French train driver and gun enthusiast who was born in the Paris area and had a history of gun crimes.
He had recently been released from prison, where he had spent a year in jail awaiting trial for a saber attack at a migrant camp in eastern Paris a year ago, where he was accused of stabbing migrants and cut them with a sword.