Elderly Man Killed by Heifer During Village Festival in Southern France

A tragedy on the village square of Saint-Just, in the Hérault. During the Saint-Just village festival, Abdellah, 72, was hit around noon on Monday by a heifer on the village square, during a release when he was in the "closed perimeter by Beaucaire barriers behind which people take refuge, the bravest then trying to tease the animal," with his coffee and his phone near a wall, reports Midi Libre. "I saw the whole scene, the cow came out, it slipped, then it charged at him, he tried to climb on the wall and the cow took him in the back. [...] He fell in front of me, we did the first aid," says Quentin, 24. Upon their arrival, the firefighters of the Sdis 34 transported him in critical condition to the Lapeyronie hospital, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit of the anesthesia-resuscitation department (Dar A). Plunged into a coma, the retired agricultural worker will succumb to his injuries.

"He didn’t know there were bulls, he just went to drink his coffee... We were alerted saying his shoulder was dislocated and there was a little blood... There was a cerebral hemorrhage... We can’t believe it, we’re devastated, to say that a bull killed him, it’s unimaginable, he was 72 years old," lament Myriam, Aziza and Zahara, three of the five daughters of the deceased, around a Moroccan tea. They want to know the truth, especially the exact circumstances of their father’s death. "We want the truth, we want to know how his last moments went," they add, accusing the organizers of not having better secured the premises. "Our father didn’t like bulls, he didn’t know, he didn’t know the rules, and even if there was a call on the microphone, you have to make sure there’s no one left on the course," they deplore.

"Touched" and "in shock," the village observed a minute of silence on Thursday in tribute to Abdellah. An investigation for involuntary manslaughter has been entrusted to the gendarmes of the Lunel company, which will have to determine the exact circumstances of the death of the one who had arrived in France with his wife in the 1980s, to work there as an agricultural worker, first in the Gard and very quickly in Saint-Just, where he had lived for 30 years. After an autopsy, his body will be repatriated to Morocco.