The elderly suspect in a Paris mass shooting that sparked violent riots before Christmas developed a “hatred of foreigners” after a home invasion in 2016, according to reports.
The 69-year-old, named only as William M. as of the time of publication, told police he wanted to die but that “before committing suicide, I always wanted to assassinate migrants, foreigners, ever since [a burglary in his home in 2016],” according to an account by Paris state prosecutor Laure Beccuau reported by The Times.
The former train driver, reportedly born in Seine-Saint-Denis, a notoriously crime-ridden Grand Paris suburb where up to 20 per cent of the population are illegal aliens, allegedly opened fire on people with a handgun near a Kurdish cultural centre on December 23rd, killing three and wounding several others, some seriously.
Prosecutors say the suspect, who was sent to a psychiatric unit for evaluation on Christmas Eve, had confessed to having “a hatred of foreigners that has become pathological”.
He was previously arrested for attacking people with a sword at a Paris migrant camp, and was reportedly supposed to be under judicial supervision at the time of the shootings.
News of the killings sparked violent riots on December 23rd and December 24th, with the Kurdish community angry that the authorities failed to prevent the attack.
Demonstrators had initially gathered on December 23rd relatively peaceably, reports suggest, but were riled by the presence of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who appeared in public near the scene of the attack to address the press, saying it was “not certain” the shooter was motivated by a specifically anti-Kurd animus although “manifestly his motivations were an attack on foreigners”.
A march on Christmas Eve attended by leftist politicians including Alexandra Cordebard, the Socialist Party mayor of the arrondissement where the shooting took place, also devolved into violence.
Cars were overturned and torched and police officers pelted with projectiles — footage shows a police van forced to reverse away from the mob under a hail of missiles at one point — on both days, with some rioters waving the hammer and sickle flag of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist movement designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the United Kingdom.
Berivan Firat, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Council in France, suggested Turkish “provocateurs” had caused the Christmas Eve disorder by displaying a Turkish flag and making the sign of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, enraging young Kurds on the march.
Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in Europe often engage in inter-ethnic violence, usually motivated by clashes between the Turkish regime and Kurdish militants in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria.
Thirty-one police officers are said to have been injured in the French riots.
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