Movement of desperation, fit of madness? It is difficult to explain why o Abdulmasih H. a Syrian refugee which revolved around France having previously spent years in stable conditions in Sweden, suddenly attacked six people with a knifeamong which four small childrenyesterday, Thursday, in the morning in Annecy Park, in eastern France.

Born in 1991, he arrived last October in this peaceful city of Upper Savoy, in the heart of the Alps. He was not known to any intelligence agency and he had no known psychiatric antecedents.

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

It is known of him that he is a Christian, that she has a three-year-old child and that she got a divorce last year after years of marriage. His ex-wife is a refugee from Syria, like himself, and has taken Swedish citizenship.

According to his mother, who was contacted by AFP in the US, where he has lived for ten years, he had done his mandatory military service in Syriabefore fleeing the country in 2011 due to the civil war, and then reaching 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 is why the police had let him go after checking him last Sunday for washing in Lake Annecy, according to Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanen.

The Swedish Migration Agency said for its part that Abdulmasih X. had received a residence permit in 2013, but since 2017 his repeated attempts to obtain Swedish citizenship had failed.

“severe depression”

This man had submitted asylum requests to Switzerland, Italy and France, where his file had recently been rejected. “He was informed that he could not be granted asylum in France because he had asylum in Sweden,” the interior minister said yesterday, Thursday.

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

In the Comfort he was homeless. 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 on the docks of Lake Annecy told the regional newspaper Le Dauphiné Libéré that he had been seeing him on the shore of the lake “every day from morning to night, rain or shine” 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. “That 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, Ms. Lynn Bonnet-Matisse.

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”.