Knife attack in Paris: Bompard calls for “not to give general political meaning”

The coordinator of La France insoumise Manuel Bompard called on Sunday “not to give a general meaning” to the knife attack in Paris by an Islamist suffering from psychiatric disorders who left one dead, first seeing it as the act “ of a person who is clearly unbalanced. He also expressed on LCI his “fear” and his “emotion” after the death of a German-Filipino tourist on Saturday near the Bir Hakeim bridge, not far from the Eiffel Tower.

The assailant, a Frenchman born in 1997 whose parents are Iranian, allegedly told the police officers who arrested him that he “could no longer bear to see Muslims die, both in Afghanistan and in Palestine,” according to the Minister of Defense. 'Interior Gérald Darmanin.

“I don't think that all the people who are moved by the situation in the Middle East feel solidarity with the act of an unbalanced person like this,” argued Manuel Bompard. The Bouches-du-Rhône MP stressed that after this attack, which also left two people injured and for which the anti-terrorism prosecution opened an investigation, “questions will be asked”.

“How is it that a person who was on S file has clearly escaped surveillance, what was the state of his psychiatric follow-up?”, he asked, in reference to the psychiatric disorders from which the attacker allegedly suffered. .

Manuel Bompard singled out, without naming them, the leaders of the right and the extreme right, who, “before having the first information, explained that it was necessary to expel all of the S files”. “There, it turns out that, in this case, it is a person who is a person of French nationality so we were not going to expel him,” he underlined.

Conversely, “I see clearly that, for example, the question of this individual’s madness seems to be completely removed from their reading grid.” “However, it seems to me that this is one of the subjects that will have to be examined following this tragedy,” he insisted, noting that “psychiatry in France is in a deplorable state.”

“Let us avoid simplistic solutions,” urged Manuel Bompard, such as that calling for “creating more prison places” because prison is “a school of vice”, a “factory for producing recidivism”.