Who is the Syrian who shed blood in the park of Annecy in France?

Movement of desperation, fit of madness? It is difficult to explain why Abdelmasih X., a Syrian refugee roaming France after previously spending years in stable conditions in Swedensuddenly attacked six people with a knife, including four small children, yesterday, Thursday, in the morning in a park in Annecy, in eastern France.

Born in 1991, arrived last year October in this peaceful town of Haute-Savoie, in the heart of the Alps. He was not known to any intelligence agency and had no known psychiatric history.

Since his arrest, he has offered no explanation for what he did and has thwarted police efforts to take him into custody “by walking away,” a source close to the investigation said. He was scheduled to undergo a psychiatric evaluation today.

It is known about him that he is a Christian, that he has a three-year-old child and that he got a divorce last year after years of married life. THE former spouse he is a refugee from Syrialike himself, and has taken Swedish citizenship.

According to his mother, contacted by AFP on USAwhere he has lived for ten years, he had done his mandatory military service in Syria, before fleeing the country in 2011 due to the civil war, and then arriving in Sweden via Turkey and then Greece.

“We met in Turkey, we fell in love (…) After two years, we got married, but he couldn’t get Swedish citizenship, so he decided to leave the country. We broke up because I didn’t want to leave Sweden,” said his ex-wife from Trollhattan, in southwestern Sweden, contacted by AFP.

According to the French authorities, he had been granted refugee status by Sweden on 26 April 2003 and was traveling with the necessary documents. That’s why the police had let him go after checking him last Sunday for bathing in Lake Annecy, according to Interior Minister Géral Darmanen.

The Swedish Immigration Service stated on her part that Abdulmasih H. he had received a residence permit in 2013, but since 2017 his repeated attempts to obtain Swedish citizenship have failed, as reported by the Athens-Macedonian News Agency.

“severe depression”

The man had submitted asylum claims in Switzerland, Italy and France, where his file had recently been rejected. “He was informed that he could not be granted asylum in Francebecause he had asylum in Sweden“said yesterday, Thursday, the Minister of the Interior.

During a rare conversation with his ex-wife after his departure, Abdelmasih H. had explained to her that he was living in France “inside a church”. This had happened four months ago.

He was homeless in Anesi. According to the director general of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii) Didier Lessy, “he was receiving the asylum seeker’s allowance after he was registered as such”, but, because there was no place, “he was never hosted by the national reception mechanism”.

A worker at Annecy’s lake docks told the regional newspaper Le Dauphiné Libre that she had seen him on the shore of the lake “every day from morning till night, shine or rain” for about two months. He describes a man “muttering under his breath”, without seeming aggressive.

According to his mother, Abdelmasih H. suffered from “severe depression” and his failure to obtain a Swedish passport worsened his condition. “My daughter-in-law told me that,” he told AFP. “She said that he was never well, always depressed, with dark ideas, he didn’t want to leave the house, he didn’t want to work…”

“He applied for citizenship, they rejected him,” primarily because he had served in the Syrian army, he said. “This probably drove him crazy».

At the time of the attack, he was “neither under the influence of drugs nor under the influence of alcohol,” according to Annecy’s prosecutor, Lynn Bonet-Mathis.

At this stage, his attack remains “without an obvious motive”, he said yesterday, Thursday, without ruling out that it could have been “an irrational action”.