- Suspect is unemployed and belongs to Bosnian family.
- French prosecutor says suspect surrendered to Italian police.
- French president, other politicians condemn attack.
A man has been arrested in Italy on suspicion of stabbing a young Malian man to death while the victim was praying inside a mosque in southern France, French authorities said on Monday.
The public prosecutor of the southern city of Ales in the Gard region, where the attack took place on Friday, Abdelkrim Grini told BFM TV on Monday: “I can confirm that the alleged perpetrator did indeed go to an Italian police station, near Florence, last night at around 11-11:30pm.”
“We knew he had left France … It was only a matter of time before we got our hands on him,” he added.
Commenting on the motivation for the attack, Grini said: “The anti-Muslim motivation is the preferred lead […] but there are also elements in the investigation that suggest there were other motivations for carrying the act […] perhaps a fascination with death, to be considered as a serial killer.”
French politicians on Sunday condemned the attack, which was captured on video and published on Snapchat.
The suspect is from a Bosnian family, unemployed, and with ties to the southern Gard region. He lived in the small town of La Grande Combe which lies north of Ales.
“He was someone who had remained under the radar of the justice system and the police, and who had never been in the news until these tragic events,” Grini had said on Sunday.
In La Grand-Combe, more than 1,000 people gathered on Sunday for a silent march in memory of the victim, Aboubakar Cisse, who was in his twenties.
They marched from the Khadidja Mosque, where the stabbing occurred, to the town hall.
Several hundred people also gathered in Paris later Sunday, including three-time presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who accused Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau of cultivating an “Islamophobic climate”.
“Racism and hatred based on religion will never have a place in France,” President Emmanuel Macron said on X on Sunday, expressing “the nation’s support” to the victim’s family and “to our Muslim compatriots”.
France, a country that prides itself on its homegrown secularism known as “laicite,” has the largest Muslim population in Europe, numbering more than 6 million and making up around 10% of the country’s population.
