The man who broke into the Corneilles college in Cortaillod (NE) and who shouted “Allahu akbar” on December 8 will not be prosecuted. The prosecutor in charge of the case considered that the schizophrenia from which the individual suffers, and the signs of decompensation observed in him by doctors and police officers after the facts “allow us to conclude, with high probability, that he was totally irresponsible, leading to to exemption from any penalty. In view of the national echo of the case, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has decided to make public the legal consequences, the prosecutor informed Tuesday.
On the afternoon of December 8, around 2:45 p.m., this Algerian, who had joined the Boudry Federal Reception Center, went to the south courtyard of the establishment where there were some 300 students. School staff asked him to leave the premises, otherwise the police would be alerted. It was then that the individual shouted several times, “God is greater,” in Arabic.
The investigation revealed that this man, aged around twenty, had spent the night of December 6 to 7, 2023 at the Psychiatric Emergency Center, where doctors diagnosed schizophrenia and prescribed medication. Shortly after being arrested, the individual, who made incoherent comments, was hospitalized until December 15. He was then transferred to the Frambois administrative detention facility (GE) with a view to his expulsion to Germany, the country in which he had submitted his first asylum application.
In this case, the representative of the Neuchâtel Public Prosecutor’s Office notes that “from a legal perspective, it can be admitted that the words spoken constituted a threat capable of alarming the population, certainly more due to the international context linked to terrorism than to the fact that they were not accompanied by any other gestural or physical threat.” But in such a case, “the author of an offense is not punishable if, at the time of acting, he did not have the ability to assess the illegal nature of his act or to determine according to this appreciation”. The magistrate also decreed that “a possible therapeutic measure would make little sense given his departure for Germany”. Case closed, then.
