Suspect admits killings in Finland
Greece to extradite Belgian ‘terror’ suspect
HELSINKI, Aug 22, (AFP): The main suspect in last week’s stabbing attack in Finland admitted Tuesday to killing two people and injuring eight others but denied any intent to murder, his lawyer said.
The Turku district court placed Abderrahman Mechkah, an 18-year-old Moroccan citizen, in formal custody after he made his statement to the court via video link from hospital, where he is being treated for a police gunshot wound to the thigh.
“The main suspect admits acts which led to deaths, but denies that they were murders,” his lawyer Kaarle Gummerus told AFP. The stabbing is being investigated as Finland’s first terror attack.
“The offender in Turku incident is suspected on probable cause of murders and attempted murders with terrorist intent and placed in detention,” the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said in a Twitter post. “He didn’t explain the motive of the acts,” Gummerus added.
Police have said that Mechkah — an asylum seeker who arrived in Finland in early 2016 — targeted women in the Friday rampage at a market square in the southwestern port city of Turku.
Two Finnish women were killed and six women and two men were injured. Among the injured were a Briton, an Italian and a Swede.
Shot
Mechkah was shot by police minutes after the attack.
Most of the hearing was held behind closed doors, but press photos taken of the video screen at the beginning showed the suspect lying in his bed, his head propped up on pillows and his face shielded by a white sheet.
The country’s intelligence agency SUPO said Monday that it had received a tip earlier this year that Mechkah might have become radicalised. Because the tip did not contain information about a concrete threat of an attack, it had not yet been investigated, the agency said.
In June, the SUPO raised Finland’s terror threat level one notch, to “elevated” from “low”, the second on a fourtier scale. It said at the time that it saw PARIS, Aug 22, (AFP): Nearly a third of people on a French terror watchlist are believed to have psychiatric disorders, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said Tuesday, a day after a mentally ill man went on a rampage in a stolen van in Marseille.
The incident, in which the man drove into two bus shelters, killing one person and seriously injuring another, immediately drew comparisons with a string of attacks across Europe in which vehicles have been used as killing machines.
But investigators said there was no evidence of any terror links, saying the 35-year-old French driver who had a book about philosophy and another about Islam in the car, had “psychological” problems.
The attack is one of a handful in the past month in France in which men suffering from mental illnesses have apparently mimicked jihadist assaults.
Collomb said that of the around 17,400 people flagged by the intelligence services as radicals one third were believed to be mentally ill.
The minister said he would enlist the help of psychiatric hospitals in
an increased risk of an attack committed by Islamic State group militants, noting that foreign fighters from Finland had “gained significant positions within IS in particular and have an extensive network of relations in the organisation.”
Four other Moroccan citizens were arrested in a raid in Turku just hours after the attack. On Tuesday, the Turku court placed two of them, Mohamed Bakier and Ilyas Berrouh, in custody.
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Greece will extradite a woman arrested over the weekend to Belgium under a Europol “terror” warrant, police said Monday.
“The extradition procedure has been identifying patients who represented a potential threat.
“The medical secret is sacred of course but at the same time we must find a way to avoid a certain number of individuals suffering from serious disorders carrying out attacks,” he told BFMTV news channel.
Terrorism experts have long warned that the intense media coverage of jihadist violence could spur copycat attacks by mentally unstable individuals with a propensity for violence.
Citing the case of the Marseille driver, who had several convictions for violence and robbery, Collomb said: “It’s not terrorism... but it is imitation”.
On August 6, a knife-wielding 18-year-old on leave from a psychiatric hospital was arrested at the Eiffel Tower after bursting past security shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest).
The man said during questioning that he had wanted to kill a soldier.
A week later, a 32-year-old man rammed his car into a pizzeria near Paris, killing a 13-year-old girl and injuring 13 people.
set in motion by order of an appeals prosecutor,” a police source told AFP, without clarifying when the handover may take place.
The Greek coastguard on Saturday said the 22-year-old woman had been arrested “over suspected links to terrorist activity.”
Authorities declined to identify the suspect’s nationality but state agency ANA said she was a Belgian of apparent Moroccan origin. Greek police declined to say which particular incident the warrant was issued over.
Belgian authorities also declined to give detail on the case, beyond noting that the suspect is not connected to last week’s attacks in Spain.