The debate about immigration and “ultra-violence” among young people rages on in France after another murder case involving minors. An Afghan migrant and his mother have been detained after 15-year-old Matisse was stabbed.
Mayor Gil Avérous in Châteauroux, where the murder took place, was interviewed by the TV channel RMC in 2021. He could then say that they had been forced to accept Afghan migrants from a tent camp in the center of Paris.
In the recording, he says that he received a message at nine o’clock in the evening that a group of Afghan migrants would arrive in the city the next day. The authorities were to break up an illegal migrant camp at street level outside the Ile de France prefecture in Paris and “solved” the problem of distributing the migrants out into the countryside, without further preparation or support measures.
After the murder of Matisse, mainstream French media were quick to convey that the deceased boy had made xenophobic statements towards the Afghan. The allegation is said to have been leaked anonymously from the police and reportedly stems from initial questioning of the suspected killer.
But according to witnesses at the scene of the murder, the claim is wrong.
Candidate for the EU elections in June, Marion Maréchal in the Reconquête party, https://twitter.com/MarionMarechal/status/1785015776778576111 to downplay and highlight extenuating circumstances of the murder in an attempt to equate the murder victim with the accused.
– Nothing, absolutely nothing can justify the murder of a 15-year-old, says Maréchal in the video post.
The boys on the murdered youth’s football team also cannot understand that he might have said something racist.
– We play in a club with people from very different backgrounds and he has never come up with anything that can be interpreted in that direction, says one of the teammates to Le Figaro.
– He was very kind and got along with everyone. I have never seen him fight, says one to another, named Wassim.
The accused Afghan is known to the police for two recent knife robberies of mobile phones, without any noticeable consequences for him.
On April 22, the police filed their case against him for tricking a young man into a park using social media. There he carried out an ambush to steal his mobile by pressing a knife to his throat.
But after it became more difficult to imprison minors in France from 2021, the only means the police have in such cases is to put the young criminal under “judicial control”, a purely administrative measure.
In his own posts online, the 15-year-old accused of murder presents himself as a gangster and appears aggressive and well-trained in boxing. He and his family are all Afghan citizens, but have legal residence in France.
The boy who was killed had a clean record and was the son of a couple who run a popular restaurant in the town. He was an apprentice chef and wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps.
According to witnesses to the knife murder, Matisse and the accused murderer participated in an informal rap competition in the neighborhood that fateful afternoon. An argument ensued and the Afghan reportedly became angry when he lost a subsequent fight.
He then allegedly went home and retrieved a knife, which he filmed and posted on social media as he returned on foot to look for his victim.
According to witness statements, the Afghan’s mother was in tow. According to the witnesses whom the newspaper Le Parisien spoke to, she did nothing to calm her son down when they found Matisse, but appeared instead as “vindictive” and “unstable”.
Matisse was sitting in the back seat of an old wrecked car with some other young people and was stabbed several times in the upper body through the window of the car.
When he got out and tried to escape, he passed out. According to the witnesses, the Afghan mother then hit the boy in the face while he was lying critically injured on the ground.
– We are no longer a country that gives asylum to people, we are an asylum under the open sky, exclaimed editor Arthur de Watrigant in the journal L’incorrect in a program on the news channel Cnews.
The former judge Georges Fenech says in a https://twitter.com/Livrenoirmedia/status/1785043223204806685 that he “feels great anger”:
– On 30 September 2021, the rule of law was disarmed in relation to minors. Before this reform, minors could be imprisoned for at least 15 days. Consider this: 15 days. April 22. [datoen da afghaneren gjennomførte sitt siste knivran]. If he had been caged for 15 days on April 22 this murder would not have happened.
– A very heavy responsibility rests on the politicians who are responsible for this reform, more than on the judiciary, said an upset Fenech in the recording.
The leader of Reconquête, Éric Zemmour, refers to the murder as a new example of “francocide”, referring to the fact that French people are being murdered and that French culture is under attack.
– We now have a number of incidents with murder victims who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now this wrong place is all of France and the wrong time is the time that shows on your watch at all times. This is the story of a republic that allows its children to be murdered by a criminal immigration policy, by an irresponsible penal policy and by those responsible in politics and the press who, through their ideology and their cowardice, allow the guilty to be allowed to cross paths with their victims, says Arthur de Watrigant.
Commenting on the murder of another 15-year-old at the beginning of April, Mayor Jean-Marie Vilain of Viry-Châtillon said that street violence now includes far more and far younger people right down to primary school age – and indeed also in kindergartens.
Two weeks ago, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the prime minister to investigate solutions to what he called the “violent increase in ultra-violence”
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Introduces curfew for minors to stop wave of violence
- On 19 November last year, the young rugby player Thomas was stabbed all over with a knife by a group of boys with a Muslim immigrant background at a village party in Cépol.
- On 9 April this year, a 15-year-old was stabbed to death in the ghetto area of La Monnaie in Romans-sur-Isêre. This is the same place those who are being investigated for the murder of Thomas come from.
- On 10 April, an Algerian was killed and another injured in Bordeaux when an Afghan asylum seeker stabbed them because they were drinking alcohol during an Islamic holiday.
- On the night of April 16, 22-year-old Philippe Coopman was beaten to death with a bat by three teenagers in a car park in the north of France.
In the period 2015-2017, there were an average of 120 knife incidents per day in France, according to figures from the Observatoire national de la délinquance et des réponse pénales (ONDRP). More recent figures are not available.
