A suspected cannibal who killed a 90-year-old man in southern France apparently to eat his heart and tongue was a former soldier who served in Afghanistan, an army source said on Monday.
The 26-year-old homeless man, who claimed to hear voices, had passed army medical tests without any problem, said a senior source at the Marine Infantry Tank Regiment, a light cavalry regiment of the French army.
The source at the regiment, one of the army’s most decorated units, said the man had “posed no problems during his stint” in Afghanistan, where he obtained the grade of corporal.
When he returned, the man refused an army offer to extend his contract, saying he wanted a painting job, the source said, without specifying when the man had served.
The man on Thursday allegedly attacked the elderly man in a tiny hamlet, smashing his head with a metal object, and then extracted his heart and tongue to cook and eat.
Some remains of cooked meat were found on a plate with some beans. Post-mortem tests have shown that a part of the heart and the tongue were ripped out, but it is not yet clear if the meat found was of human origin.
The suspect allegedly assaulted another man, breaking his shoulder, before being arrested.
Psychiatric tests after the arrest showed the man suffered from delusions.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS