Paris gunman refuses to talk, to be charged Friday
Paris gunman Abdelhakim Dekhar was refusing to speak to investigators on Friday as the deadline for opening a formal case against him approached. Psychiatrists who examined him in 1995 reported that he compared himself to Nelson Mandela.
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"Not having access to his case file, my client has chosen for now to invoke his right to remain silent," Dekhar's lawyer Rémi Lorrain said on Friday.
Investigators have been hoping to question Dekhar over shotgun attacks on a TV station, a newspaper office and a bank since he was found semi-conscious in an underground carpark near Paris on Wednesday evening.
After being taken to the famous police headquartes on Paris's Ile de la Cité, he was transferred to a nearby hospital with special facilities for ill prisoners where he remained on Friday.
Police had the right to hold him for three days without formally opening an inquiry, so a magistrate was expected to begin proceedings on charges of attempted murder and kidnapping on Friday evening.
Dekhar was more talkative in 1995 when psychiatrists examined him in connection with the robbery and shootings that led to his imprisonment in 1998.
The doctors described him as a pathological liar, who claimed to be an Algerian secret service agent, and found him "rather voluble and obviously happy to open up", according to case notes seen by Le Monde newspaper.
"He happily compares himself to Nelson Mandela," who spent 27 years in jail for fighting apartheid before becoming South Africa's president, the psychiatrists' report says.
According to the British press, Dekhar married a Turkish student in the UK, where he lived for 13 years before returning to France in July.
Dekhar's sister, Farida Dekhar-Powell, lives in the commuter town of Shenfield, in Essex, southeast England, and is a French teacher.
"I stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He is not part of my life and that's how it stays," she told the Evening Standard newspaper.
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