NICE: French prosecutors were on Monday probing a terror motive after a man who had posted racist videos shot dead his Tunisian neighbour and badly wounded a Turkish man in the south of France.
The shooting late on Saturday in Puget-sur-Argens, in the southern region of Var, came after a Malian man was stabbed to death in April in a mosque, also in southern France, as concern grows over hate crimes against Muslims.
The shooting was initially investigated by regional prosecutors as a suspected murder motivated by the victim’s ethnicity or religion.
But French national anti-terror prosecutors, known by their French acronym PNAT, announced on Monday that they would be taking over the investigation.
The suspect wanted to “disrupt public order through terror”, according to a source close to the case.
The suspected killer, a Frenchman born in 1971, fled the scene in a car but was arrested not far away after his partner alerted police.
He posted videos with racist content before and after the shooting late on Saturday, according to regional prosecutor Pierre Couttenier.
The victim, who was born in 1979, was shot five times. The Turkish national was wounded in the hand and needed hospital treatment, the prosecutor said.
‘Swore allegiance to French flag’
The suspect, a sports shooting enthusiast, “posted two videos on his social media account containing racist and hateful content before and after his attack”, the prosecutor said.
According to French daily Le Parisien, the suspect said he “swore allegiance to the French flag” and called on the French to “shoot” people of foreign origin in one of his videos posted on social media.
The PNAT prosecutors said on Monday that they had opened an investigation into a “terrorist plot” motivated by the race or religion of the victims.
“The racist nature of this double crime is beyond doubt, given the hateful remarks made by the killer,“ said SOS Racisme, an anti-discrimination NGO.
“This tragedy echoes a series of racist crimes that have occurred in recent months,“ it said, denouncing a “poisonous climate” in the country including the “trivialisation of racist rhetoric”.
Aboubakar Cisse of Mali was stabbed dozens of times while attending prayers at the mosque in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe on April 25.
A French national of Bosnian origin accused of carrying out the attack surrendered to Italian authorities after three days on the run. Italy then extradited him to France to face justice.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau was bitterly criticised for never travelling to the scene of that crime to show solidarity, while PNAT anti-terror prosecutors also came under fire for not taking over the case and instead leaving it to regular criminal prosecutors.
On Monday, Retailleau denounced the murder of a Tunisian man, calling it a “racist act”.
“Racism in France and elsewhere is a poison, and we can see that it is a poison that kills,“ Retailleau told reporters.
“Every racist act is an anti-French act.”
He added that he had spoken on the phone with the Tunisian ambassador to France.
He later spoke to his Tunisian counterpart, Khaled Nouri, who “condemned a terrorist crime”, according to an official government statement.
Nouri urged French authorities to “ensure the protection of the Tunisian community on French territory”, the Tunisian statement added.
