Three days after the attack on Samara, 13, at the Arthur-Rimbaud college in Montpellier where she attends school, the three minors arrested admitted their involvement. According to the prosecution, which does not mention any religious dimension, this surge of violence finds its origin in “invectives” between students on social networks.
Reacting to this tragedy, as well as to the attack on Shamseddine, a 15-year-old teenager, who died on Friday after being violently attacked on Thursday near his college, in Viry-Chatillon (Essonne), Emmanuel Macron called for the school remains “a sanctuary” where “a form of uninhibited violence among our adolescents” would have no place.
“We will be intractable against any form of violence, (…) we must protect the school from that,” declared the Head of State, during a visit to a school in Paris, remaining very cautious about the causes and circumstances of these two attacks which took place outside the school grounds. “I don’t know if school is linked to that” and “I don’t want us to make perhaps excessive shortcuts,” insisted Mr. Macron.
While none of Shamseddine’s attackers have yet been arrested, three minors were arrested on Wednesday for the attack on Samara, now out of a coma: one of her classmates at college and two teenagers aged 14 and 15. All three “admitted” to having “hit him”, revealed, Friday April 5, the Montpellier prosecutor, Fabrice Belargent. A judicial investigation was opened for “attempted intentional homicide of a minor under the age of 15”, he added, specifying that he had requested the placement in pre-trial detention of the oldest, “suspected of having worn the the most violent blows”.
Administrative investigation
Heard briefly, Samara “confirmed the violence to which she was subjected”. However, she “did not mention” acts of “harassment over a long period”, according to the prosecutor, who does not mention any religious dimension. In front of the media, the teenager’s mother claimed that her daughter had been “taken by the flu” for more than a year by a college friend who called her a “disbeliever.” No doubt because of the way she dressed, said the mother, raising the hypothesis of a conflict around religious practice.
“In the state of the investigations, it appears that this attack takes place in the context of a group of adolescents who had the habit of insulting each other” on social networks and publishing photos there, explained Mr. Belargent, according to whom “the tension between the accused and the victim results in part from these publications”.
The possibly religious aspect of this issue was commented on on the political side, pushing Samara’s mother Thursday evening on the set of “Touche pas à mon poste! », on C8, to denounce “the exploitation of [his] daughter’s suffering by the extreme right”.
On Thursday, the socialist deputy for Essonne, Jérôme Guedj, national secretary for secularism of his party, announced that he was taking legal action for “threats of a religious nature” which allegedly took place before the attack in Samara. In his letter to the Montpellier prosecutor, he emphasized that, according to the victim’s mother, “her daughter, of Muslim faith, was treated as a ‘kouffar’, which means ‘unbeliever’ in Arabic, and a ‘kahba’, which means “whore”, and this is because she “wears make-up” and “dresses European style”.
Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, on Friday rejected “any political instrumentalization” and stigmatization of Islam, saying that the real problem is “the trivialization of extreme violence and the harmful impact of social networks “.
In parallel with the criminal investigation, “an inspector” charged by the Minister of Education, Nicole Belloubet, with carrying out an administrative investigation, in order to determine whether any misconduct had been committed among the staff of the establishment, arrived safely on Friday morning and “started their auditions” at Arthur-Rimbaud college, the Montpellier academy announced to Agence France-Presse. They have eight days to submit their report to the minister, who warned in advance on Thursday that her “arm will not tremble” to take possible sanctions.
