Global Courant
LE PECQ, France — The attacker slashed at the 24-year-old man with the knife he used to brutally stab one young child after another. But instead of running away, Henri stood his ground – using a heavy backpack he carried to swing at the attacker and deflect his knife.
French media praised Henri as “the hero with a backpack” on Friday, after he was seen in a video wrestling with the attacker and charging after him during the knife attack that seriously injured four children aged between 22 months and 3 years, and also injured two adults.
Henri had a heavy backpack on his back and was holding another in his hand when the attacker swung at him. Even after being beaten, Henri continued to harass the attacker by chasing him into a playground – where the man repeatedly stabbed a child in a stroller – and then out of the park, carrying his backpacks the entire time. He appeared at one point to throw one of the sacks at the attacker and then pick it up again to swing once more.
Henri’s father, François, said he believed his son’s dogged pursuit kept the attacker from stabbing any more victims before police wrestled him to the ground.
“He took a lot of risks — when he wasn’t armed, with just his backpacks,” the father told The Associated Press. “He kept running after him for minutes to prevent him from coming back and slaughtering the kids any more. I think he avoided carnage by scaring him off. Really very brave.”
François requested that their surnames be published, expressing concern that their family was being suddenly and inadvertently exposed at a time of shock and outrage in France caused by the ferocity of Thursday’s attack and the helplessness of the young victims.
The profile of the suspected attacker, a 31-year-old Syrian refugee, also sparked renewed political debate over France’s migration policy. Critics on the right and far right of French politics have been quick to dust off their arguments that French migration controls are too lax.
Henri, for his part, shied away from the label ‘hero’. He said he was “trying to act as all French should act or would act.”
“At that moment you disconnect your brain and you instinctively react a bit like an animal,” he told broadcaster BFMTV. “It was impossible for me to witness that without reacting.”
“I am by no means the only one who has responded. Many other people around, like me, started running after him to scare him, to push him away. And other people went straight to the children to take care of the injured.”
“I remember there was also a council worker who came from the right with a big plastic shovel to try and hit him,” said Henri.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday that all four children have had surgery for their life-threatening knife wounds and are “under constant medical supervision”.
“Their situation is stable,” she said.
Government spokesman Olivier Veran, a doctor by training, said two of the children remain in critical condition.
President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte traveled to a hospital to treat three of the four children. Motives for the attack in and around a lakeside children’s playground in the Alpine town of Annecy remained unexplained. The suspect, who has refugee status in Sweden, remains in custody. Psychiatrists are evaluating him, Veran said.
Henri’s father said that in a phone call after the attack, his son “told me that the Syrian was incoherent, said many strange things in different languages, invoked his father, his mother, all the gods.”
“In short, he was possessed by who knows what, but possessed by folly, that’s for sure,” the father told the AP.
He said he showed the disturbing video of the attack to his other children and his wife, adding that he and his wife had trouble sleeping even after learning that Henri was safe.
“We thanked providence and his guardian angels,” he said.
Most of the children were rushed to a hospital in the French Alpine town of Grenoble – the first stop for Macron and his wife on Friday morning. They didn’t speak to reporters when they went in.
The fourth injured child was treated in Geneva, in neighboring Switzerland.
Two of the four children are French and the other two were tourists – one British, the other Dutch.
Two adults also suffered knife wounds – life-threatening for one of them, authorities said. One of the adults was injured by a knife and a police shot as they detained the suspected assailant.
Portugal’s foreign ministry said a Portuguese national was one of two adults injured.
“During the tragic event, while trying to prevent the attacker from fleeing the police, a Portuguese citizen was seriously injured and is now out of danger. For this act of courage and bravery, we deeply thank him,” the ministry said.
French authorities said the suspect was recently denied asylum in France because Sweden granted him permanent residence and refugee status a decade ago.
Chief Prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the man’s motives were unknown but did not appear to be related to terrorism. He was armed with a pocketknife, she said.
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Jennifer O’Mahony contributed to this report from Madrid.
