Elderly Man Sentenced to 20 Years for Attempted Murder in France

At the end of the trial that opened on Monday before the Assizes Court of Lot-et-Garonne, the jurors followed the requisitions of the public prosecutor and found Mohamed Maghfour guilty of attempted murder in recidivism. The 81-year-old Moroccan was sentenced to twenty years in prison for this charge, reports Sud Ouest.

On July 30, 2019, he attacked with a knife Sana, a woman in her forties, near her workplace in Agen. "He came out from behind a van, he blocked the road with his arms, telling me that today I would not go to work. I wanted to pass, he pushed me and took out the knife. I see myself shocked, on the ground. I heard: ’Too bad I didn’t kill her’," Sana recounts during the trial. Earlier the same day, the Moroccan had verbally assaulted her, calling her a "big whore" in Arabic.

For his part, Mohamed Maghfour has denied the facts since the first day of the trial. "How can you want me to love her? She’s a poor person who has nothing. I have pity for people. She was crying, making me understand that she needed money and I was giving it to her..." he said, claiming to have acted in self-defense. "They both got on me, to hit me. I took out the knife to scare them. If I had wanted to kill her, I would have done it," details Mohamed.

"The criminological dangerousness of the accused is no longer to be proven," notes the psychiatric expert, describing the convicted person as a "narcissistic, paranoid, egocentric, rigid, intransigent person..." For Me Céline Pascal, Sana’s lawyer, Mohamed develops a feeling of "possessiveness" towards her, stressing that "Mohamed’s version and motive are not credible, from the outset."