Mosque murder suspect declared irresponsible in initial evaluation

An initial psychiatric evaluation has concluded the man who killed Aboubakar Cissé, a 22-year-old Malian, in April in a mosque in southern France, is irresponsible.

This murder had sparked significant emotion in the country, stated the Nimes public prosecutor, Cécile Gensac, on Thursday. A second evaluation has been ordered, she specified.

Olivier Hadzovic, indicted for "murder due to race or religion" and imprisoned on May 9, was shortly thereafter transferred to a specialized psychiatric unit. During his first presentation to the investigating judge for his indictment on May 9, he "was not able to make statements," the prosecutor emphasized at the time, with the young man's lawyer citing psychiatric issues.

In the course of the investigation, he was then subjected to "a psychiatric evaluation concluding within the judicial framework to an irresponsibility due to psychiatric disorders having abolished discernment at the time of the acts," the prosecutor indicates. "A new joint evaluation by two experts has been mandated by the investigating magistrate," stated Gensac in a press release.

According to French law, a person whose "discernment or control of their actions" was "abolished" at the time is "not criminally responsible." If this discernment is only "impaired," the perpetrator can be judged.

Cissé was stabbed 57 times on April 25 in the prayer room of the Khadidja mosque, in La Grand-Combe, a small town in southern France. His killer, aged 20, then fled to Italy, where he eventually turned himself in to the police before being transferred to France. The murder of Cissé had revived a debate in France around the discrimination faced by Muslims and on the very term "Islamophobia." The victim's family's lawyers had unsuccessfully sought for the investigation to be reclassified as a "terrorist murder."