Asked about the link between the refusal of the asylum application in France of the suspect of the Annecy attack and his act, the Minister of the Interior judged that it was a "disturbing coincidence", to the news of 20 hours of TF1 this Thursday.
As a reminder, the man suspected of having injured six people, including four children, with a knife in a park in Annecy on Thursday had learned on June 4 that his asylum application in France could not be accepted since he had already held refugee status in Sweden for 10 years and was therefore in a legal situation on the national territory.
The 31-year-old Syrian joined the France eight months ago. "For reasons that are not well explained, he then applied for asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France, which he did not need to formulate since he already had asylum in Sweden," the minister explained on TF1. "It is indeed a disturbing coincidence that last Sunday he knows the answer of the French administration: no asylum, since you already have him in Sweden and he is taking action," said Gérald Darmanin.
"It probably drove him crazy"
The young man, a Christian who had served in the Syrian army, left his country in 2011 at the start of the civil war, his mother said. Entering Turkey illegally, he met his future wife, a compatriot, and the couple later settled in Sweden. "After two years, we got married, but he couldn't get Swedish citizenship, so he decided to leave the country. We separated because I didn't want to leave Sweden," she said by phone. The Swedish Migration Authority confirmed that he had been granted a residence permit in 2013, but repeatedly failed to obtain citizenship since 2017.
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According to his mother, who has lived in the United States for ten years, he suffered from "severe depression" and these refusals worsened his condition. "He didn't tell me anything. It was my daughter-in-law who told me that," she said. "She said he was never well, always depressed, with dark thoughts, he didn't want to leave home, he didn't want to work... "He asked for nationality, he had a rejection," a priori because he made the Syrian army, she continued: "it probably drove him crazy."
The fifty-year-old said she was "in a state of shock" since she was informed of her son's role in the attack, which left six wounded, including four children aged 22 to 36 months.
