In particular, on December 8, 2021, he attacked with a saber a migrant camp in the Parc de Bercy, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, injuring two refugees. Following this attack, the police arrested four of the victims, who had been kept in custody for “organized gang violence”, before being released, one of the refugees nevertheless having an OQTF.
This time, three activists of the Kurdish nationalist movement were killed, including a political leader and a refugee singer, previously imprisoned in Turkey for his songs in Kurdish language and his opposition to the regime. Two of the victims were injured in the premises of the Kurdish cultural center on rue d’Enghien, the other in the restaurant opposite.
After being stopped in a nearby hairdressing salon, the presumed assassin, according to the formula, was arrested and, before being taken into custody on December 25, entrusted to the psychiatric infirmary of the police headquarters. He would indeed have declared himself “pathologically racist” and would resent the migrants, whom he would hold all responsible for a burglary committed at his home.
Arrived at the scene of the attack, the Minister of the Interior finely analyzed that the killer “obviously wanted to attack foreigners”. It was hard to deny it. Darmanin deemed it appropriate, to support the hypothesis of the act of an isolated insane person, to specify that this “was not listed as someone ultra-right or extremist who would participate in illicit organizations”. Macron, if he could only admit that the target of the attack was Kurds, did not miss the opportunity to pay tribute ” to [ses] forces of order for their courage and coolness”. Unsurprisingly, the far right, from Ciotti to Zemmour, via Le Pen, saw “a demonstration of judicial laxity” and even a “widespread enslavement”.
Whatever they say, even if they are not openly approving the killer’s gesture, it is precisely this unhealthy climate generated by the racist propaganda of the extreme right, and especially by the anti-migrant policy of the government, which maintains favorable ground for this kind of action.
But the explanation of the facts as the gesture of a racist psychopath, but isolated, is difficult to convince, and does not convince the Kurdish associations in particular. The foreigners that his delirium pushed him to target happened to be precisely those of the Kurdish cultural center. The victims were known for their activism within the Kurdish Workers’ Party, the PKK, violently fought in Turkey and elsewhere by Turkish President Erdogan. The assassin intervened just at the time when a preparatory meeting was to be held in the premises of the center for the commemoration of the assassination, ten years earlier, of three other Kurdish nationalist militants, in another center of the same neighborhood.
According to Humanity, this assassin, opportunely released from prison, would have even been dropped off by a car, after a journey to Saint-Denis, just in front of the center of the rue d’Enghien, where he killed precisely militants. Too many coincidences erasing chance, we can only quote a spokesperson for the Kurdish Democratic Council of France (CDKF): “Let no one try to make us believe that this is a simple attack orchestrated by the extreme right. […] The fact that our associations are targeted is of a terrorist and political nature. »
And indeed, if the assassin is undoubtedly a psychopath, it would not be the first time that such a character could have been manipulated, in this case by Erdogan’s services.
These have also manifested themselves on their side since, in Ankara, the French ambassador was summoned on December 26 to be informed of the dissatisfaction of the Turkish authorities with what he considers to be anti- Turkey launched “by PKK circles”. This sounds like a warning to the French authorities not to push too far the investigations on the motivations or the possible instigators of the killer, knowing that they will not be too much pray to classify the case as the act of a mad person.
The Kurdish associations are surprised in any case, and we understand them, that this attack was not qualified as a terrorist enterprise, as it would certainly have been if it had come from a Muslim. And the emotion is not about to fall, as shown, on December 24 and 26 in Paris and in other cities, hundreds of demonstrators. They wanted to protest against this new attack and against the impunity enjoyed by those responsible for the January 2013 murders, whose file remains classified as a defense secret. The police were of course present with their truncheons.
Attack against a Kurdish association: a well-encouraged madness