Former Morocco Resident Charged in Bayonne Mosque Attack, Reveals Complex Past

Enigmatic character, Claude Sinké who injured two people during the attack on the Bayonne mosque, is the subject of an investigation led by the French authorities.

The investigators’ task is to shed light on this event of Monday, October 28, which occurred in Bayonne, due to this octogenarian who does not count friends in his entourage and who is described as a "psychologically unstable" character.

Marianne provides more details on the man: "Claude Sinké was born in Morocco, where he claims to have lived for 27 years." His book entitled "France with an Open Heart or Human Misery", like "a disjointed pamphlet" of 84 pages, according to the French weekly, expresses "his analysis of French society" and his obsessions, namely Islam and homosexuals.

It is in Meknes that Claude Sinké was born, in September 1935, to a legionnaire father. According to Marianne, Claude Sinké is a former student of the "Casablanca Industrial School", while he did his military service in 1956 in Rabat where he will obtain the "rank of sergeant major". He had even applied for dual nationality with the Moroccan Consul in Bordeaux.

At the time, Sinké, who ran up against the Consulate’s refusal, regretted what was for him a "discrimination". "He (the Consul) had said that he would be happy to give it to me on condition that I become a Muslim, because Morocco did not accept Christians," writes the old man in his book.

Converted to Catharism - a religious movement whose faithful take a vow of poverty, firmly opposed to the Roman Church and its clergy - Sinké considers Islam as "incompatible with our laws and our libertarian principles, the greatest riches of our European civilization".

During his hearing on October 29 on the motives for his attack on the mosque, he declared that he "wanted to avenge the destruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, claiming that the fire in this building was caused by members of the Muslim community".