Italy has handed over the man accused of stabbing a young Malian man to death in a mosque two weeks ago to France, a French prosecutor said on Friday, May 9. Aboubakar Cissé was stabbed dozens of times while attending prayers at the mosque in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe on April 25. Olivier Hadzovic, a 20-year-old French national of Bosnian origin, who was accused of carrying out the attack, turned himself in to Italian authorities after three days on the run. "The suspect in the Grand-Combe case is being transferred today," said Cecile Gensac, the prosecutor for the nearby city of Nimes, where authorities are investigating the stabbing as "murder aggravated by premeditation and on the grounds of race or religion."
"He was handed over to the French authorities this morning," Hadzovic's Italian lawyer, Giovanni Salvietti, said to Agence France-Presse (AFP). When asked about his client's state of mind, Salvietti said: "As usual, he is saying very little." Hadzovic admitted to killing Cisse in his first statement to Italian investigators, but, according to his lawyer, he denied acting out of hatred of Islam, saying he had "killed the first person he found" in his path.
Gensac said, on May 2, that Hadzovic had been "driven by a fierce desire to kill someone and failing that, to commit suicide." He had told someone online he would "do it in the street" before considering attacking the mosque, Gensac said, and, once inside, he wrote: "He's black. I'm going to do it." He seemed to have "profoundly personal motives" and the crime was not being treated as "terrorist" as it was not linked to an "ideological claim," she added.
The Cissé family's lawyers are calling for the investigation to be reclassified as a "terrorist murder."
The case has sparked fierce debate over religious hatred in France, home to the European Union's largest Muslim community, with several groups planning a protest on Sunday.
A prayer ceremony was held on Thursday in the Malian capital city, Bamako, following the repatriation of Cisse's body.