A man suspected of a gun attack in the Paris suburbs that killed one person and wounded five has been transferred to a psychiatric unit.
The 39-year-old man, identified as Kevin T, was suffering from schizophrenia, a source close to the investigation told AFP.
Friends and colleagues marched on Sunday in tribute to the man killed in the shooting, Pengo Bossio Wangi, a 26-year-old French national of Congolese origin.
Prosecutors said traces of cocaine and marijuana had been found in the suspect’s blood. Investigators found a Bible, a Quran and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a search of his home, another police source said earlier.
The man was detained on Friday with a machine gun and tear-gas grenades in his car, shortly after the victims were shot as a vehicle drove through the towns of Trappes and La Verriere west of Paris.
Four people from Kevin T.’s family and friends have also been detained after what President Emmanuel Macron had branded a “racist terrorist attack”, as most of the victims were from foreign backgrounds.
The French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) said that the suspect had been transferred from formal custody to a police psychiatric unit “after a psychiatric examination” carried out on Saturday evening.
A further observation of about 48 hours “should allow us to evaluate whether his state of psychiatric health is compatible with pursuing his interrogation sessions”, the prosecutors said.
Tributes to victims
Several hundred people staged a march in Trappes on Saturday to show support for family of Bossio Wangi, the man killed in Friday’s shooting.
On Sunday, the founder of the mixed martial arts club where Bossio Wangi trained organised another march in nearby Aubervilliers.
Yassine Bouzrou, a lawyer for the family of the man killed, expressed surprise at the decision to end the formal detention saying it was “very rare”.
Bouzrou said there was a “worrying pattern” that “whenever an attack is carried out by the far right, the question of the perpetrator’s mental state is immediately raised – as if the individual must ‘necessarily be deranged’”.
One of those wounded was a 12-year-old girl who was hit by eight bullets and remains in critical condition.
The shooting came amid deep social and political divisions in France which will hold a presidential election in six months. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen leads in opinion polls.
- AFP