2023-09-28 02:11:49
A 38-year-old Sudanese man was sentenced on Wednesday, by the Pyrénées-Atlantiques Assize Court, to life imprisonment for having murdered the manager of an asylum seeker center in 2021 in Pau. The sentence, in accordance with the requisitions of the Advocate General, is accompanied by a definitive ban on French territory at the end of the detention period.
On February 19, 2021, Sheriff Hamed Shogar stabbed around fifteen people to the head of the asylum center within the Isard COS reception structure, in Pau. Cyril Pierreval, a 46-year-old social worker and father of two children, died an hour later in his office, despite the attempts of his colleagues to save him.
«A massacre»
“It is not a simple murder, it is a massacre, Cyril Pierreval was stabbed,” summarized the attorney general, Rodolphe Jarry, insisting on the “affirmed desire to kill”. The Sudanese went to the reception center that day armed with a knife with a 15 cm blade. For several years, he had maintained what the attorney general defined as “muted anger transformed into visceral hatred” against Isard COS, whom he held responsible for his precarious administrative situation.
Arriving in France in 2015, he obtained subsidiary protection from Ofpra (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons), in particular thanks to the help of the head of the association’s asylum center, Cyril Pierreval. But two convictions for violence and his 18 months of detention resulted in his status being withdrawn.
“I did not intend to kill him,” assured the accused
“The persistent inability to question himself, even at the hearing, and this feeling of persecution from which he cannot shake off”, are factors which “worry greatly”, underlined Rodolphe Jarry before requesting the maximum sentence, accompanied by a security sentence of 18 years and a permanent ban on entry.
“I did not intend to kill him,” assured the accused on the first day of his trial. As a final word, before the jurors retired to deliberate, he “asked forgiveness from everyone.”
“He is not just this filthy beast, he is also a man, with his history,” pleaded, in his defense, Me Béatrice Spiteri-Vinci. She spoke of “an impulse to extreme violence”, trying to undermine the thesis of premeditation of the crime.
Born in 1983 in Sudan, in northern Darfur, the man fled his country at the start of the civil war, joining a refugee camp in Chad in 2003, with his siblings. Entering Europe through Greece in 2009, he then reached Calais with the intention of leaving for England, without success. In 2015, his request for asylum in France allowed him to be transferred to the Pau reception center.
#PyrénéesAtlantiques #life #prison #murderer #asylum #seeker #center #manager