To hear him express his regrets in the voice of a fearful child, it's hard to imagine the violence of the attack for which this man is on trial before the Paris special criminal court. On September 25, 2020, Zaheer Mahmoud rushed, knife in hand, at two young people who were smoking a cigarette outside the entrance hall of a building on Nicolas-Appert Street in Paris. At the time, he thought he was avenging Prophet Mohammed, who he claimed had been insulted by the cartoons published a few weeks earlier in the pages of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo. He was unaware that the publication had left the offices at this address several years ago.

His gentle voice, full cheeks and sheepish boyish looks may have helped the Pakistani migrant convince the national child welfare agency to take him in when he arrived in France in July 2018. He was 25 at the time, but his false papers showed him to be 10 years younger. Mahmoud is not the only defendant in this case to have taken advantage of a "slightly fluctuating civil status," in the words of the presiding judge, Caroline Jadis-Pomeau.

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