Brahim Aouissaoui, 25, tells court he has no memory of 2020 attack in which three people were fatally stabbed. A Tunisian man has gone on trial in France accused of fatally stabbing three people in a terrorist attack at a church in Nice. Brahim Aouissaoui, 25, told the special court in Paris he had no recollection of the events of October 2020, when he allegedly almost decapitated a 60-year-old woman, stabbed another worshipper 24 times and slit the throat of a church worker with a kitchen knife – killing all three.
It took seven police officers to arrest Aouissaoui, who was shot several times. Afterwards, officers said he was carrying a copy of the Qur’an, three knives and two mobile phones. At the opening of the trial, the presiding judge, Christophe Petiteau, asked the defendant to confirm his name. Aouissaoui, speaking through an interpreter, did so but was unable to respond when asked to give the name of his lawyer and said he did not remember anything.
“I don’t remember what happened. I have nothing to say because I remember nothing,” he told the court. According to the anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office there were “many indications that at the time he left Tunisia … the accused intended to carry out an attack in France”. The investigating magistrate said Aouissaoui had described France as “a country of miscreants and dogs”. Aouissaoui is being tried for three murders and six attempted murders.
A national day of mourning was held for Nadine Devillers, 60, whose husband, Joffrey, completed and published the autobiography she was writing at the time of her killing, Vincent Loqués, 55, a devout Catholic who worked at the church, who had his throat cut inside the church, and Simone Barreto Silva, 44, a Franco-Brazilian care worker, who was repeatedly stabbed inside the Notre-Dame basilica. The killings came two weeks after the history-geography teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded near his secondary school north-west of Paris by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee angered at reports he had shown pupils caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in a lesson on freedom of speech.
Aouissaoui had crossed the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Italy a month before the attack and then entered France overland. Medical examinations have revealed no brain damage from the injuries caused during his arrest and the psychiatric assessment concluded his judgment was not impaired at the time of the attack. The prosecution claimed his telephone conversations in prison suggested his amnesia was “at the very least exaggerated”.
