rioted in Dublin later that evening<\/a>, seeking, as defence counsel put it, to \u201cturn us one against the other\u201d.<\/p>\nThe trial heard poignant evidence from the mother of the seriously injured girl. In a phone call at 1.45pm on November 23rd, a sobbing creche worker gave the woman the shocking news that her daughter had been stabbed. <\/p>\n
The mother became tearful when telling of her race across the city to the scene to see emergency responders working on her daughter as she lay on the ground. Other parents spoke of panic and fear upon learning of the attack and rushing to their children. <\/p>\n
Parnell Square\u2019s central location and proximity to hospitals meant medics and other first responders were quickly on the scene and 16 eyewitnesses came forward. <\/p>\n
Due to the speed at which the attack unfolded and concluded, the chaos surrounding it, and the recognised frailty and fallibility of human memory and the impact of witnessing traumatic scenes, it is unsurprising that the eyewitness accounts did not always tally with each other or with CCTV. <\/p>\n
Some spoke of children being \u201cswivelled around\u201d by the attacker so their backpacks would not be an obstacle. Several denied suggestions their accounts may have been influenced by what they might have seen in media reports. <\/p>\n
The CCTV was described by Hunt as an objective \u201cyardstick\u201d against which to assess the eyewitness evidence. He also considered that Flynn probably had the clearest view of the incident as it unfolded.<\/p>\n
It was only towards the end of the prosecution case, during the seventh and final recorded Garda interview with Bouchaker on December 21st, 2023, carried out after he had spent three weeks in hospital, that the burning question was asked. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhy? Why children?\u201d asked Det Garda Gary Moran.<\/p>\n
Bouchaker repeatedly said, via a French-Arabic interpreter, he was \u201csick\u201d, often gesticulating towards his head and referring to pain in his shoulder. <\/p>\n
When shown CCTV of the attack, he said: \u201cSomeone who is not in the right state of his mind and the families of the children when they see this, they are free to do what they want. I am sick, for 140 years, I did not have a cent, how am I supposed to live? I\u2019m sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Garda](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/S4MJUP5I4KWGYQUEA5TCSYYCNE.jpg\")
Garda Gary Moran, who gave evidence in the trial of 52-year-old Riad Bouchaker.
\nPhotograph: Collins Courts <\/p>\n
He insisted, several times, he had no intent to do harm and thanked God no one died. \u201cDo to me whatever you want\u201d was a frequent mantra. <\/p>\n
The interviews showed incoherent answers and \u201cgibberish\u201d with \u201cno guile or sophistication\u201d, said his lawyer. They demonstrated Bouchaker failed to appreciate the enormity of his situation and the \u201cviolent disconnect\u201d between the event and \u201ctrifling\u201d difficulties in his life. <\/p>\n
Moran had a different theory. He suggested to Bouchaker that he had his \u201cfull mind\u201d with him and had waited for 37 minutes on Parnell Square and \u201cweighed up your options\u201d. Bouchaker, he suggested, intended to find the school, decided against attacking bigger children and waited until pedestrians moved farther up the street before putting down his backpack and moving quickly, knife in hand, towards the group of children. <\/p>\n
Stop thanking God no one died, Moran told him. \u201cDon\u2019t thank God, thank Leanne, and you stabbed Leanne as well.\u201d <\/p>\n
In earlier interviews, it emerged Bouchaker\u2019s brother had explained to him on November 23rd that a letter from the Department of Social Protection had required him to provide, by November 22nd, documents for his application for supplementary welfare allowance.<\/p>\n
Bouchaker told garda\u00ed the letter \u201cmade me go into blackout\u201d and CCTV showed him ripping it up and dropping pieces of paper at the Ilac Centre Christmas tree. <\/p>\n
He went back to his hostel on Little Britain Street and said he packed a suitcase with clothes and his Irish and Algerian passports, left that in a mosque on Talbot Street and went \u201cwandering\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bouchaker went towards Parnell Square, where he previously stayed in emergency accommodation near the children\u2019s school. He had a backpack in which garda\u00ed later found packaging for a knife.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the damage was done in about 13 seconds,\u201d the trial judge observed last Friday when refusing a defence application, heard in the absence of the jury, for a direction aimed at having the attempted murder charges relating to the two children with lesser injuries withdrawn. <\/p>\n
The two were a boy aged five who had a laceration to his neck, treated with paper stitches, and whose jacket hood had three holes in it; and a six-year-old girl who was discharged a day after undergoing surgery to repair a non-penetrating laceration to her head and loss of a skull fragment.<\/p>\n
During that application, when defence counsel said he faced a difficult task, the judge told him: \u201cYou\u2019re a very capable lawyer, not a magician\u201d. <\/p>\n
In his ruling, Hunt said the jury was entitled to take \u201ca broader view\u201d in assessing whether Bouchaker\u2019s actions amounted to an attempt to kill. <\/p>\n
Hunt agreed with the prosecution that there was evidence from which the jury could infer intent to kill in relation to all three children. <\/p>\n
He also rejected defence arguments of insufficient evidence to support verdicts of assault causing harm to two other children and to Guille. One child, a six-year-old girl, had a bump on her head, a nick behind her right ear, a clump of cut hair on her shoulder and had wet herself. The second, a five-year-old boy, was unaware he had a small cut near his nipple and a graze under his arm until his father, having noted minute slashes in his coat, removed it and all his upper clothing with similar slashes.<\/p>\n
In his charge this week, the judge directed the jury that verdicts of attempted murder, intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm, and \u201ctheoretically\u201d, not guilty, were options in relation to the seriously injured girl. Attempted murder, assault causing harm, and \u201ctheoretically\u201d, not guilty were optional verdicts in relation to the two other children. <\/p>\n
Before the trial, the judge heard conflicting psychiatric evidence about whether Bouchaker was fit to plead and stand trial. It was agreed that a defence of not guilty by reason of insanity was not available to him. <\/p>\n
The defence psychiatrist said Bouchaker told her he was born in Algiers and gave confused accounts of his family and personal history. He spoke of memory issues from childhood, not doing well in school, financial difficulties at home, working as a butcher and selling women\u2019s clothes at markets. He came to Ireland 25 years ago and is a naturalised Irish citizen. The defence psychiatrist considered he confabulated, filling in gaps in his memory rather than saying he did not know or was unsure. <\/p>\n
Her view was that he lacked the capacity to understand the serious nature of the charges and was unfit to stand trial. She said he had moderate dementia due to a combination of a brain injury, sustained at Parnell Square, and a brain tumour. Surgical treatment was carried out for that benign tumour in 2021, he developed epilepsy, and his left temporal lobe was affected before the Parnell Square incident. <\/p>\n
His brother had said the family were concerned about his mental health for about five years before the 2021 surgery. <\/p>\n
Hunt preferred the evidence of an expert psychiatric witness for the prosecution that Bouchaker was fit to stand trial with accommodations, including an interpreter, an intermediary and simplified questions. That psychiatrist said Bouchaker had an acquired brain injury secondary to neurosurgery in 2021 and suffered a head injury at Parnell Square, but was fit to stand trial with accommodations. <\/p>\n
During the fitness to plead hearing, Bouchaker sat in court muttering words including: \u201cIs a shit country, no respect, nobody respect you\u201d; \u201cthree years, no payment, nothing\u201d; and \u201clet me go home. Your future is shit for you\u201d. At one point, he said: \u201cKill me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bouchaker\u2019s lawyer described his horrific actions at Parnell Square as \u201cundeniably senseless\u201d. They were life-altering, most grimly for the girl in the pink runners and for Leanne Flynn, whose heroic efforts to save children\u2019s lives almost cost her own. <\/p>\n
After almost three weeks, Bouchaker\u2019s trial has ended. He will be sentenced on October 12th. There is still no answer to Det Garda Moran\u2019s question: \u201cWhy? Why children?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took just five seconds for a large man with a carving knife to leave a bubbly five-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-528641","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\/528641","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=528641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Leanne](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/M4F4FCHUHVMS2XCR7NTTZNBUQA.jpg\")
Leanne Flynn, the childcare worker stabbed by Riad Bouchaker. Photograph: Collins Courts <\/p>\n