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There is never a place for racism and hatred in France, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday after the death of a brutal Muslim stab wound in a mosque south of the country.
“Religious-based racism and hatred are no place in France. Freedom of worship cannot be violated,” Macron wrote in X in his first comment on the murder on Friday, expanding his support to “our Muslim citizens.”
The running attacker stabbed Abubakar Sisse, a young Mali man in his early 20s, and then filmed him on his cell phone screaming Islamous humiliation in the village of La Grandcome in the Gard region.
French Prime Minister François Bylow had already condemned what he described as “Islamophobic atrocities,” but the prosecutors in the case emphasize that Islamophobia is just one of the motives considered.
On Sunday, about 1,000 people marched through La Grande Combe, which has only 5,000 residents, to remember the victims.
The suspected perpetrator sent a video he had taken on his cell phone to others, showing the victim writhing in pain.
A source close to the lawsuit said the suspected assailant, who asked not to be appointed, was identified as a French citizen from Bosnia who was not arrested but not Muslim.
The victim, a young Mali man in his 20s, and the attacker were inside the mosque at the time of the incident.
After praying with the man first, the attacker stabbed the victim up to 50 times before escaping the scene.
The victim’s body was only found later in the morning when other worshippers arrived at the mosque for prayers on Friday.
The “Islamophobia” protest was scheduled to take place in Paris on Sunday evening in response to the murder.
“Not ignored”
The French Muslim Faith Council (CFCM) said it was “terrifying” by the “anti-Muslim terrorist attacks” and urged French Muslims to be “very vigilant.”
“The murder of worshipers in a mosque is a sinister crime that must revolt the hearts of all French people,” the Council of Representatives of the French Institute of Jewish Studies (CRIF) added.
The attacker was named solely as Olivier A, born in France in 2004, and is unemployed without criminal records. He is “potentially extremely dangerous” and it is “essential” to arrest him before he claims more casualties, said Abdelklim Grini, the district prosecutor.
But the motive behind Islamophobia is the lead that 70 investigators “work as a priority… not just that,” Greenwich said.
“There is a certain factor (this) that suggests that this motivation is probably not the main motivation…or the only motivation,” he added.
Grinet was speaking at Yale’s Regional Centre along with Home Minister Bruno Retillo, a hard-line right-winger who takes the strict line on immigration and Islamism.
Retaillo emphasized that “the possibility of anti-Muslim behavior has not been ignored at all.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published by Syndicate Feed.)
