It's over. After five long hours, the hostages from Arles prison were able to return home, fortunately unharmed. But what happened? Who is the suspect? What were his demands? 20 Minutes suggests you rewind to understand everything.
Who is the author?
Considered “very dangerous”, the alleged perpetrator of the hostage-taking is a 37-year-old man of Guyanese origin and imprisoned since 2015. He is serving a sentence for rape at gunpoint. He was definitively sentenced by an assize court of appeal to 18 years of criminal imprisonment and arrived at Arles prison in November 2023. Prior to this last sentence, he had been sentenced “for various acts of violence or of thefts aggravated by violence”, according to the Tarascon prosecutor, Laurent Gumbau.
This inmate was eligible for release in 2031, a date which will probably be pushed back in light of these new facts. While several sources have highlighted the psychiatric disorders of the detainee, they have not been formally confirmed by the magistrate, according to whom “at this stage, […] we do not have a psychiatric profile, no psychosis, no psychotic element.”
Who are the victims?
Five people found themselves taken hostage in Arles prison: three nurses, a prison guard and a psychiatrist. The doctor, a young woman “mother”, was released two hours before the end of the hostage situation, thanks to negotiations by the police. The victims were “under the threat of a weapon that [l’assaillant] had been made”, a “kind of bladed weapon” made “with metal spikes”, explained the prefect of police Pierre-Edouard Colliex, during a press conference following the arrest of the suspicious.
There were no injuries but although they were not “physically” injured, the victims were nevertheless taken care of because, as the prefect underlines, “five hours of hostage taking like that can leave significant trauma. “Things ended well but they could have been very dangerous because of the weaponry and because of the profile of the hostage taker,” he concluded.
What were the detainee's demands?
According to the prefect, the “negotiation [a été] quite long and quite complicated. The man had “a fairly incoherent attitude” and “expressed a desire to get out of prison,” he explained. For his part, the public prosecutor of Tarascon, Laurent Gumbau, considered that the “motive” seemed to be to change establishment. But “there was no specific, written request, as prisoners can make to the prison administration,” he said. The 48-hour police custody which began after the suspect's arrest should help to clarify the situation a little.
