The mujahid who committed the terror attack in Marseille last weekend wasn’t just known to French police, he was a regular guest in various police station stations all across the south of France for twelve years. Despite the fact that he was in the country illegally, despite the fact that he committed numerous crimes, despite the fact that he had repeatedly used multiple identities, there was nothing the police could do about him until he stabbed two people to death — then and only then could they take care of the problem by shooting him dead.

Many thanks to Ava Lon for translating this discussion from French TV, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:12 He had been arrested last Friday in a La Part Dieu mall

00:16 next to the train station in Lyon. He was leaving this store

00:20 trying to steal a jacket worth €39. The surveillance cameras

00:24 record it and he ends up arrested at this police station. There he presents

00:28 a Tunisian passport, but he is on French territory illegally.

00:32 Police officers take his fingerprints, and just like

00:36 every time that he is arrested, fingerprint records are never

00:40 consulted. If they had been, the police officers would have seen that it was

00:44 the eighth time that this man had been arrested since 2005. And almost every time

00:48 he gives a totally different identity. He is interrogated

00:52 for small infractions or for the lack of an ID, and in those cases police officers don’t

00:56 try to compare his fingerprints with the National Records. —It requires personnel;

01:00 it requires money, it requires many other means.

01:04 But there’s nothing that would justify an inquiry

01:08 and whatever would compare with the fingerprints of this individual,

01:12 since, I remind you, that we are talking, at the beginning, about a thief

01:16 in a mall. Something which is common occurrence in the police profession.

01:21 At the police station his arrest lasts until Saturday. Finally charges aren’t filed

01:25 for the theft of the jacket. From there he could have been sent to

01:29 prison, because he isn’t a legal resident. That’s what happens in most cases,

01:33 as this attorney explains to us. But that Saturday the prefecture

01:37 didn’t put him in the detention center. We know

01:41 that on a Saturday the prefecture services slow down. That’s the way it is;

01:45 they lack personnel in the prefecture and this

01:49 could be one of the reasons for detention measures

01:53 not being ordered against him, and

01:57 no placement in the detention center. What had happened at the prefecture on Saturday?

02:01 The Interior Minister decided to take control of the General Administration Inspectorate

02:05 in order to find out in what circumstances the man was released.

02:09 Good evening, George Brenier. —Good evening. —You are our specialist

02:13 on police, and I can imagine that viewers are asking themselves many obvious questions about that.

02:17 First, why wasn’t the Saint-Charles train station murderer — who

02:21 has been illegal for years — detained or deported

02:25 to his home country? —Well, we’ll go back to this precise case that is baffling, from Friday

02:30 You saw it — the man, who at that point was only a little thug, is arrested,

02:34 detained at the police station; on Saturday morning

02:38 the justice decides that this case isn’t of much interest in the end,

02:42 so they release him, and the suspect isn’t a resident, so he is supposed to be deported

02:46 to Tunisia; it’s there where the “machine” or the prefecture

02:50 will start working very painstakingly: no official is there to authorize

02:54 his placement in detention, and then nobody is able to say

02:58 if the welcoming center has enough space to take him in, either.

03:02 A surrealistic, Kafka-like situation, but the result is implacable: the thief,

03:06 the assassin-to-be, a little more that 24 hours later is

03:10 released without being bothered for one second. And that very man was,

03:14 during all those years, twelve years, caught at least eight times,

03:18 giving every time or almost every time a different identity. How could he go unnoticed?

03:22 By the police officers? This is what police officers call a “judicial black hole”

03:26 During every past arrest he had no ID, so

03:30 every time he had given a false name and a false birth date. Every time the police

03:35 took his fingerprints and compared them with the records.

03:39 Every time they found out his aliases that had been used with those

03:43 fingerprints; the officers saw that something was wrong, but without

03:47 those papers, and without [knowing] his home country at that point,

03:51 they couldn’t do anything at all, except — yet again — release this