On October 29, 2020, at around 8.30 a.m., 21-year-old Brahim Aouissaoui enters the basilica in Nice armed with a knife with a 17 cm blade. First he attacks Nadine Devillers, a 60-year-old worshipper, leaving her practically decapitated. Then he stabs 44-year-old Franco-Brazilian Simone Barreto Silva, mother of three, who takes refuge in a restaurant before she dies, and finally 55-year-old sexton Vincent Loquès, father of two daughters.
Who is Brahim Aouissaoui?
He comes from Sfax in Tunisia and maintains contacts with followers of the Salafist ideology, at least two of whom are known to the Tunisian anti-terrorist services. An alcohol and drug user, he changed his behaviour in late 2018 and “became zealous” in his religious practice, his family and childhood friends report.
Arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa, he is quarantined for coronavirus and leaves for Sicily on October 11. There he works for a fortnight with the “sole aim of raising the money to travel to France”, according to investigators. “I will leave tomorrow for France, the land of infidels and dogs,” he wrote to a contact person on October 25. (…)
Amnesia and feigned mental confusion?
When he wakes up in hospital, he claims to have “forgotten everything about what he did, falsely asserts that his parents are dead, and is mistaken about the membership of his siblings”.
(…) “If that had really been me in those pictures, I would recognise myself,” he becomes impatient. “Stop denying the obvious at last!”, the judge gets annoyed and highlights his “undeniable malice”.
A defence strategy?
“The systematic and opportunistic character” of his amnesia does not constitute “denial” but “a defence system that amounts to a refusal of any cooperation with justice”, according to the two psychiatric experts.
The experts’ opinion
According to the experts, Brahim Aouissaoui was addicted to alcohol and drugs for a long time and “redeemed himself through rigorism and asceticism before turning to radical commitment and then terrorist action”. His judgement at the time of the attack was neither suspended nor impaired and he has a “violent psychopathic profile”.
Final revelation from Brahim Aouissaoui.
In detention, where he had one incident after another and had become close to radicalised detainees, he also boasted of being the Nice attacker.
Two weeks after his arrival in June 2022 at Meaux prison (Seine-et-Marne), he was transferred to Beauvais (Oise) as an emergency measure, as he was suspected of planning an attack on prison guards with two other radicalised inmates.
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I left this Church with my wife after Mass in Sept 2019 with my wife; as we stepped down to the street I said to my wife “ It would be so easy here to stage an Islamist attack”. This was the very spot this happened. For about a year I felt like writing to the priest warning him; I now know it was a premonition! I am sure that poor lady Ms daSilva stood beside us in Mass. Only one imam in Nice condemned the attack and he had to get police protection! France need to start putting the boot into these idiots!