The man accused of attempting to murder three children at Parnell Square in Dublin in November 2023 told garda\u00ed the children did nothing to deserve what had happened to them but that he was not in his right mind.<\/p>\n
Riad Bouchaker, aged 52, of no fixed abode, has pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder charges and to four other counts of assault.<\/p>\n
He told garda\u00ed a decision to refuse him social welfare made him “go into blackout”.<\/p>\n
The jury have been watching Mr Bouchaker’s second interview with garda\u00ed on the afternoon of 20 December 2023.<\/p>\n
The questions of Garda Conor Mackey and Garda Paul Griffin were translated by an Arabic interpreter who then translated Mr Bouchaker\u2019s answers back into English.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouchaker was asked what he remembered about the day of the incident on Parnell Square on 23 November.<\/p>\n
He said he did not remember and did not know, telling garda\u00ed he had a “fish memory” and had already forgotten who they were.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouchaker had told garda\u00ed in his first interview that he had done “something wrong” and he was asked again about this.<\/p>\n
He said he was upset when he received something and threw it away and made a gesture of holding something in his hand.<\/p>\n
He said he knew he did something bad but he was sure he “did not kill or want to kill or harm the children”.<\/p>\n
Asked what was in his hand, Mr Bouchaker said it was a brand new knife that he wanted to take back home with him.<\/p>\n
He said he found it in his accommodation and never saw it before. He told garda\u00ed he was “upset” because “they did not pay me”.<\/p>\n
He said he had been applying for 14 years and “they said no”. He said “it sounded like this country was telling me to leave” and he said he was upset. He gestured as he described putting his hand to his side and he said he did not mean to do what happened.<\/p>\n
Asked what he had done, he said he found himself shaking and someone speaking to him.<\/p>\n
Asked how he ended up at the school on Parnell Square, he said he had lived in that place before and knew the place. He said he felt like he was “saturated” and he told garda\u00ed to do whatever they wanted. He said he “didn’t have any conscience to go and hurt anybody”.<\/p>\n
He said he did not know what happened. He said he knew he was sick and the doctor had said he was sick. He told garda\u00ed “please guys kill me” and he said he was ready for whatever the family wanted.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouchaker told garda\u00ed he did something that he felt he was dead when he did it. He said he never meant to kill anybody. He said he was an Irish national and the social welfare refusal decision made him go into blackout. He told garda\u00ed that his brother said to him “what’s wrong with you” and “you are not this kind of person”.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouchaker said for 19 years he did not speak to people and was always alone. He said he wrote to the social welfare department three times in order for them to change their mind but nothing happened.<\/p>\n
Asked to explain what he meant when he said he was ready for whatever the girl\u2019s family chose for him, he said he had no idea.<\/p>\n
Garda\u00ed played Mr Bouchaker CCTV footage of Parnell Square in which he identified himself.<\/p>\n
The translator said he was using “half phrases” but putting them together, Mr Bouchaker said he did something wrong because he was upset at the negative decision he got from social welfare but he did not mean to hurt anybody.<\/p>\n
He then said he had not recognised anyone in the footage and said he was “literally unconscious in there”. He said he “was lost conscious” and whatever applied to him he was ready to accept it. He added that he never did anything similar in his life.<\/p>\n
He asked “what am I doing and what’s happening to me”. He continued that he had been told in hospital that “the girl was saved, and he was happy that she was saved”.<\/p>\n
The jury has heard that the five-year-old girl, who was most seriously injured in the incident, was deprived of oxygen for 40 minutes due to a stab wound to the heart and was now in a wheelchair and unable to speak or do anything for herself.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouchaker said he had never seen the children in his life. As further footage was played, Mr Bouchaker said it was not his mind. He said he did not know why he did that.<\/p>\n
He said his mind felt like there was no brain in his head – it felt like it was squeezed or smashed. He said “thank god they are all alive” and said again, “Please do whatever you want with me”. He said God was his witness that he was not in his mind at all.<\/p>\n
Garda\u00ed put it to him that nothing could change what had happened, but the one question that remained was why – and why children? Mr Bouchaker said they did nothing to deserve what had happened to them, but it was not him in his right mind.<\/p>\n
He said “thank god nobody had passed”. He said he knew the parents were the ones who got hurt most by this incident in which children got hurt but he was not conscious and he said he “would never do that on my conscious mind” and had never done anything of that sort in my life.<\/p>\n
Judge Tony Hunt told the jurors that they would get seven memorandums of interviews and four DVDs when they were deliberating.<\/p>\n
He said some of the interviews would be read to them and some would be played. He said he expected evidence related to the interviews would be completed by the end of tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The man accused of attempting to murder three children at Parnell Square in Dublin in November 2023 told…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-514465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}