A 69-year-old man who is the main suspect of Friday’s deadly attack against a Kurdish cultural centre and a nearby Kurdish cafe in Paris, has been discharged from the psychiatric unit he was transferred to and is once again in custody, Reuters reported on Sunday.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the suspect William M’s custody resumed on Sunday afternoon, adding that he would be presented to an investigating magistrate on Monday.
Since his arrest, the man, who is accused of killing one woman and two men on 23 December, has provided investigators with details of his motive and his actions on the day of the incident, French news site BMFTV reported.
According to a statement he made while in custody, William M first went to Saint-Denis in the early hours of last Friday, carrying an automatic pistol and ammunition to murder foreigners. Finding the streets deserted, he gave up and went to Paris’s 10th arondissement instead, knowing it was an area populated with Kurds. He opened fire outside the Ahmet Kaya Cultural Centre on Rue d’Enghien, killing Emine Kara (Evîn), a leading figure of Kurdish women’s rights movement, musician Mîr Perwer (Mehmet Şirin Aydın) and political activist Abdurrahman Kızıl. He continued his advance on the same street, wounding two Kurds and one Frenchman as he went. He later entered a hair salon where he was disarmed by someone from among the customers and staff.
The shooter was arrested by police at 11:40 on Friday with one weapon, four magazines containing a total 14 rounds of ammunition and a box carrying 25 rounds of ammunition, according to another statement made by the Paris prosecution. William M said that his intention had been to use up all the ammunition and then kill himself.
The shooter told investigators that his resentment of foreigners had been triggered after a 2016 burglary at his home. This hatred of foreigners became completely pathological over time, according to the prosecutor, Laure Beccuau.
William M. said that he wanted to take all his enemies to the grave, specifying that by enemies he meant all “non-European foreigners”, adding that his only regret was not having committed suicide after Friday’s shooting spree.
The shooter had a history of attacks against foreigners. He was arrested in 2021 for attacking the tents of immigrants with a sword and wounding two Sudanese. He was released on probation on 12 December as he completed the maximum term for pre-trial detention according to French law and was awaiting trial.
A psychiatric report prepared during his pre-trial detention concluded that William M had a serious grudge against foreigners.
According to Beccuau, there is no evidence at this stage to treat William M’s attack as a terrorist act. The prosecutor stated that examination of a computer and smartphone owned by the suspect has not revealed any links to terrorist groups, including far-right extremists.
However, the statements of French officials have little effect on the Kurdish community’s conviction that last Friday’s attack was a terrorist act, possibly linked to the Turkish government and Turkish intelligence.
This opinion, shared also by some French politicians, is to a large extent related to the frustration over a similar 2013 attack on Kurds which has remained unsolved. In the previous attack, a Turkish gunman with alleged links to Turkish intelligence killed three female Kurdish activists, including a founder member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
“France is mourning. I wanted to stress the difference between a vicious racist crime and a terrorist act. The difference between them is the link to an adopted political ideology,” said the French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti on Saturday after a meeting with the representatives of the Kurdish Democratic Council in France.
“Of course I cannot put myself in the place of judicial authorities. The laws prohibit my comments on an ongoing case. But the Ministry of Justice is the guarantor of those laws. That’s why I wanted to meet representatives of the Kurdish community,” Fırat News Agency quoted Moretti as saying.
The minister said that the prosecutors responsible for anti-terrorism investigations were in contact with the Paris prosecution, adding that the definition of the crime could change in later stages of the investigation, but the sentences in either case would be the same.
