A retired railway worker in France was found guilty this week of a stabbing spree in which he attacked a migrant camp in Paris with a sword.
William Malet, 73, was sentenced to seven years in prison by the Paris Criminal Court on Monday for an attack on a Bercy Park migrant camp on December 8, 2021, that left two people injured with slash wounds from a sabre.
During the trial, Malet admitted that he was motivated by a racist dislike of foreigners and attacked the camp in an attempt to scare migrants into returning to their homelands.
“I wanted to hurt them, I wanted to terrorise them, so that they would leave there,” he told the court, according to Le Parisien.
During the attack, the retiree was said to have shouted out “damn foreigners!” as he slashed at the migrant tents, injuring a Sudanese migrant in the thigh in the process.
Another migrant, from Ethiopia, was approached from behind by Malet as he went to urinate. The sword struck him in the back and the thigh. He said Malet was silent and masked, “like a ninja,” during the attack.
Despite the severity of the attack, Malet was released back onto the streets after a year of pre-trial detention. Just 11 days after being released from prison on December 23, 2022, he went on a mass shooting spree at a Kurdish cultural centre, which he claimed was a front for the Marxist-terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The attack left three dead and three others injured. Malet is said to have admitted that the attacks were a result of a “pathological hatred” of foreigners.
“I wanted to kill myself, and I told myself that I was going to take some of them to death,” Malet said of the attack.
The 73-year-old will face a further trial for the 2022 attack starting in February of next year. He will be tried for racially aggravated murder and attempted murder.