Teen Suspect in Thwarted French Church Attack Had ’Fascination with Violent Death’

The investigation into the thwarted attack in Béziers thanks to Moroccan intelligence is progressing. During a search of Leila B.’s home, the young woman arrested in the night of April 3 to 4, indicted on April 8 for "criminal terrorist conspiracy" and then placed in pre-trial detention, the investigators discovered a diary that indicates the psychological profile of the accused. Le Parisien revealed excerpts from this notebook. Surahs inciting jihad, diagrams of explosive manufacturing, drawings of knives, pistols, Islamic State executioners holding a decapitated head, a drawing of a Nazi soldier and swastikas... Excerpts that confirm this young "out-of-school" woman’s fascination with violent death, Nazism or even the beheadings of the Islamic State.

What about her plans? "It’s 12:11 pm, I just woke up and I have lots of things to do. I have to go buy an outfit, hydrogen peroxide, a glass container [...] Soon it will all be over, soon I will take revenge. From now on, no one will be able to stop me..." she writes on November 9, 2020. It emerges from her online conversations, particularly on Telegram with radicalized individuals, that she had the rage to kill. "The Christians, I’m going to kill. Cut off heads. I’m going to kill the people in the church, yes Montpellier in France," she wrote on March 31 to an Internet user, probably a jihadist in Syria. Leila also records other terrorist projects in her notebook, including the attack on her high school. "On D-Day, I’ll get up in the morning, prepare everything. Around 9-10 a.m., I’m going to shoot one of my neighbors and then decide whether to shoot 3 other neighbors. [...] Then I’ll go to school and start the massacre. I’m going to blow up, destroy things, shoot everyone in my path," writes this girl whose father is an alcoholic and seriously ill.

During the search, the investigators also made rather surprising discoveries. A poster depicting the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Center hung on a wall, photographs of the mutilated body of Samuel Paty, a 30-centimeter kitchen knife placed on the bedside table, bottles of sulfuric acid, acetone, denatured alcohol, syringes, electrical wires, etc.

"I drew in the near future the plan of the church that I could see from my window. I wanted to make a TATP bomb. I wanted to put this bomb in the church. I hadn’t decided yet when I wanted to detonate it, or the time or the date," Leila confessed to the investigators. Her family describes her as a child in family breakdown who lived in seclusion. "I think she needs to be seen by health professionals," her grandfather suggests to the police.