Why did Nathan C. stab passers-by on Friday in a park near Paris? Two days after the attack on Villejuif, the profile and radicalization of this young convert to Islam, a brilliant former student suffering from psychiatric disorders, were at the heart of the counter-terrorism investigation.
Friday, the young man of 22 years, dressed in a blue djellaba, struck with a knife several people in a park of this commune in the south of Paris, killing a passerby and wounding two women, before being shot by the police .
"High intellectual capacities"
Witnesses described an attitude of "extreme determination", saying they were "struck" by the "apparent calm" of the assailant, who took action with constant cries of "Allah Akbar! "And spared a walker because he was a Muslim, reported the prosecutor of Créteil Laure Beccuau.
At the end of the first investigations, the national anti-terrorist prosecutor's office finally took up the case, noting its "certain radicalization" and "organized preparation for taking action". Despite the gray areas, his portrait began to take shape on Sunday.
Born in 1997 in Les Lilas (Seine-Saint-Denis), Nathan C. is described by his family as having presented very early with "high intellectual capacities", but also with early mental suffering. He was the subject of psychiatric monitoring from childhood and was hospitalized several times, sometimes "at the request of his parents," said Laure Beccuau.
After a “normal” educational path up to the bac, he managed to integrate a very renowned business school in Angers. Former comrades, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP a student who "played basketball", "pleasant", the "kind of nice guy with whom we mess around in the corridors".
None were aware of psychiatric treatment or of possible religious beliefs. "I never thought he would one day do this kind of thing because it seemed normal," summed up one of them.
After a year, Nathan C., however, stopped this training, indicate his former comrades. "What will create obstacles to the pursuit of his studies (...) is both his psychological problems and problems of addiction to various narcotic drugs," said Laure Beccuau. Nathan C. was hospitalized in Sainte-Anne in Paris in the spring and left in May with a drug treatment which he had stopped in June.
Converted in 2017
Returning to the Paris region for several years, he lived in a brick building located in a quiet street in the 14th arrondissement, not far from his parents' home. There, a neighbor described a "quiet", "uneventful" family, whose eldest son, "polite", "said hello and smiled". Last year, she had just noticed that "he had changed the way he dressed and he had grown a little bearded."
The young man had converted to Islam "in May or July 2017", according to the prosecutor's office of Créteil. However, the question of its radicalization remained on Sunday. Nathan C. was not known to "any specialized service" and only had in his locker a case of drug use when he was a minor and a procedure classified without follow-up for violence during a demonstration "Night standing" in 2016.
The investigations will in particular try to clarify what was played in the days preceding the attack which would have been prepared and perpetrated without the help of accomplices, according to the first elements of the investigations. Searched by investigators, the young man's studio presented "all the signs of an apartment that was no longer going to be occupied," said the prosecutor of Créteil.
"Salafist" works
Friday, Nathan C. had brought to Villejuif a bag containing notably "Salafist" works as well as a letter with testamentary accents suggesting, according to the investigators, that he was thinking of "taking the plunge".
At the very beginning of January, he had also wished to marry religiously with his companion, also converted, but he had been refused an imam on the grounds that the process had not been preceded by a civil marriage. On his Facebook page, he had chosen to highlight a quote from the Koran: "Our Lord said:" Remember me, I will remember you "".
Society
Knife attack in Villejuif: Anti-terrorist prosecution seizes investigation
Paris
Villejuif knife attack: Man stabs passers-by, one dead and two injured
- News
- Terrorism
- Police
- Investigation
- Knife
- Villejuif