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terça-feira, 3 de junho de 2025
Tunisien tué dans le Var : la cousine de la victime témoigne sur France .../ France opens terror case after Tunisian hairdresser shot dead in ‘racist act’
France
opens terror case after Tunisian hairdresser shot dead in ‘racist act’
Inquiry is
first since anti-terrorism prosecution unit set up to investigate potential
links of crime to ultra-right
Angelique
Chrisafisin Paris
Tue 3 Jun
2025 15.06 CEST
French
prosecutors have opened a terrorism investigation after a man in the south of
France, who they say posted racist videos online, allegedly shot dead his
Tunisian neighbour.
Hichem
Miraoui, 45, a Tunisian hairdresser who lived in the village of
Puget-sur-Argents, near the Mediterranean town of Fréjus, was shot five times
near his home late on Saturday and died at the scene.
As local
people laid flowers outside Miraoui’s hairdressing shop on Tuesday and prepared
to attend a march in his memory this weekend, the murder prompted warnings from
anti-racism groups about trivialising racist rhetoric.
The
suspected killer, a 53-year-old French man believed to be Miraoui’s neighbour,
is thought to have fled by car and was arrested nearby after his partner
alerted police. He is also thought to have wounded a Turkish man in the hand.
The regional
prosecutor, Pierre Couttenier, said the alleged killer, a sports shooting
enthusiast, “posted two videos on his social media account containing racist
and hateful content before and after his attack”.
French media
reported that the man had sworn allegiance to the French flag and had called on
French people to seek out and shoot people of foreign origin.
Specialised
prosecutors said they had opened an investigation into a “terrorist plot”
motivated by the race or religion of the victims. The suspect wanted to
“disrupt public order through terror”, a source close to the case told Agence
France-Presse.
The
classification of the fatal shooting as a potential terrorist act is
significant: it is the first time since the national anti-terrorism prosecution
unit was created in 2019 that an apparently racist murder has been investigated
for potential connections to ultra-right terrorist ideology.
The murder
comes less than two months after Aboubakar Cissé, a Malian man who had trained
in France as a carpenter, was stabbed to death inside a mosque where he
volunteered in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe. The French national
accused of the attack surrendered to Italian authorities after three days on
the run and was extradited to France.
Mourad
Battikh, a lawyer for Miraoui’s family, said: “Hichem’s death is the direct
consequence of an atmosphere fed by stigmatisation … and the trivialisation of
racist violence.”
He later
told France Info radio: “We’re looking at an ideology here, a premeditation.
Here is an individual who probably did not act alone, who at least did not act
on impulse.” He added: “We must take the time to reflect and ask ourselves how
do individuals manage to carry out the most hateful crime – to take a life – in
the name of the French flag. Today, the French flag is being made into the
standard of a hateful ideology.”
Earlier, the
anti-discrimination NGO, SOS Racisme, spoke of a “poisonous climate” in France
and what it called the “trivialisation of racist rhetoric”.
Bruno
Retailleau, the hardline interior minister and head of the rightwing party Les
Républicains, denounced Miraoui’s murder as a “racist act”. He told reporters:
“Racism in France and elsewhere is a poison, and we can see that it is a poison
that kills. Every racist act is an anti-French act.”
Retailleau
had been criticised for failing to travel to the scene of Cissé’s murder in
April.
Aurore
Bergé, the minister for equality and anti-discrimination, told France Info:
“The state is mobilising against all forms of hatred.”
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