French judges on Saturday handed preliminary charges of attempted murder to a man suspected of stabbing four young children and two adults in a French Alps park.
The suspect is a 31-year-old Syrian refugee with permanent residency in Sweden. His name was not released.
Lead prosecutor, Line Bonnet-Mathis, said the man was presented to investigating judges in the lakeside town of Annecy on Saturday and handed the charges. He is in custody pending further investigation.
The prosecutor said the victims are no longer in life-threatening condition after Thursday’s attack.
The children, between 22 months and 3 years old, remain hospitalized.
The six victims came from four different countries: France, Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal.
Police detained the suspect in the lakeside park in the town of Annecy after bystanders — notably, a Catholic pilgrim who repeatedly swung at the attacker with his backpack — sought to deter him.
The pilgrim, Henri, a 24-year-old who is on a nine-month walking and hitchhiking tour of France’s cathedrals, said he’d been setting off to another abbey when the horror unfolded in front of him. The attacker slashed at him, but Henri held his ground and used a weighty backpack he was carrying to swing at the assailant.
Henri’s father said his son “told me that the Syrian was incoherent, saying lots of strange things in different languages, invoking his father, his mother, all the Gods.”
The motive behind Thursday’s savage attack, in and around a playground, remained unexplained. The prosecutor said it didn’t appear to be terrorism-related.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited the victims and their families, first responders and witnesses Friday.
Macron said two young French cousins who were the most critically injured have stabilized, and doctors were “very confident.”
The suspect’s profile fueled renewed criticism from far-right and conservative politicians about French migration policies. But authorities noted that the suspect entered France legally, because he has permanent residency status in Sweden. Sweden and France are both members of the E.U. and Europe’s border-free travel zone.
He applied for asylum in France last year and was refused a few days before the attack, on the grounds that he had already won asylum in Sweden in 2013, the French interior minister said.
