“Shooting”, “deadly shots”, “attack”… The French media competed in imagination on Friday to qualify the act of the shooter who left three dead and three injured on rue d'Enghien, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
Shooting, gunshots, shots, attack...
When Le Parisien, Le Figaro and BFMTV evoked "a shooting in Paris", Ouest-France spoke for its part of "shots", Liberation and Le Monde preferring to use the term "attack".
But the definition given by the Larousse indicates that a shooting involves “an exchange of shots”.
Gold William M., the suspect, is, according to the first elements of the investigation, the only one to have opened fire on Friday, before being controlled with his bare hands by customers of a hairdressing salon.
The term “attack”, which designates the action of attacking someone or something, is therefore more appropriate.
The attack
Friday evening, as the profile of the alleged killer became clearer, many readers and Internet users wondered why the media persisted in not qualifying his act as an attack, sometimes seeing it as a desire to minimize the facts.
Almost systematically linked to terrorism in everyday language, the term attack does not actually have quite the same meaning from a legal point of view.
Defined by article 412-1 of the Penal Code, the notion of "attack" covers "acts of violence likely to jeopardize the institutions of the Republic or to undermine the integrity of the national territory", either coup attempts or secessionist ventures.
The terrorist enterprise
To qualify what the media commonly call an "attack", the courts will speak of a "terrorist enterprise", i.e. an action whose aim pursued by its author(s) is "to seriously disturb public order by intimidation or terror”.
“Legally, it is necessary to prove the intention to seriously disturb public order by intimidation or terror to establish that it is a terrorist attack”, explains to the Parisian William Julié, lawyer specializing in criminal law.
A definition whose action of the shooter in the rue d'Enghien ticks all the boxes.
Read alsoShooting in Paris: William M., a retired weapons enthusiast and “taciturn”, who had already tried to kill
The investigations opened on Friday evening relate, however, to facts of "assassinations, attempted murders, violence with weapons and violations of the legislation on weapons of a racist nature" (
The suspect William M. admitted having acted because he was “racist”
).
The terrorist character has, for the time being, not been retained and the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) has not seen fit to take up the investigation.
A decision that may explain why the media remain cautious.
"As long as justice does not retain the terrorist qualification or that the PNAT has not seized, we cannot write that it is about a terrorist act", confirms Damien Delseny, head of the justice police service of the Parisian.
How does the PNAT decide?
In order to determine the terrorist character or absence of an act, the PNAT, questioned by Mediapart, explained that it bases its analysis "case by case" on various parameters: "The motivations of the author, his personality, his 'he is known to the specialized services or in relation to people known to the specialized services for their membership of terrorist or extremist groups, his psychological and psychiatric state and finally the seriousness of the act as well as his modus operandi'.
“Either we are dealing with a racist unbalance who wanted to attack foreigners, and in this case the terrorist character will not be retained, or we discover that he wanted to attack the Kurdish community in particular or that 'He was approached by the Turkish services and the facts will be reclassified in connection with a terrorist enterprise,' sums up William Julié.
The motives of the suspect remain for the moment rather vague: the Minister of the Interior indicated that the shooter had "obviously wanted to attack foreigners" without being able to affirm that he was specifically targeting the Kurdish community.
The minister added that he did not have information that would link the suspect to previous facts linked to the “ultra-right”.
William M., on the other hand, was known to the police, in particular for having tried to attack migrants with a saber in Paris in 2021.
A psychological expertise will certainly be requested in order to know the mental state of the suspect, described as "crazy" by his father on Friday.