A childcare assistant has told a jury she saw a man “ferociously” stabbing and jabbing with a knife at a five-year-old girl before going toward other children at Dublin’s Parnell Square “swinging” the weapon.
Leanne Flynn said she grabbed Riad Bouchaker twice and was stabbed, suffering multiple injuries, during a struggle.
She said he appeared “hell-bent” on getting the children. She said she shouted for help and other adults intervened and tackled him.
This happened on November 23rd, 2023, when Flynn and another childcare worker were taking the 13 young children from their school to a creche on Parnell Square.
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Caio Benicio, from Brazil, who was working as a Deliveroo driver at the time, was driving down Parnell Square East on his motorbike when he said he heard screaming.
He said he saw people running and a fight between a woman and a “big man” with a little girl involved. He said he saw Bouchaker grab the child with his left hand and pull her from the woman.
He said the man had a “big sharp knife” in his right hand and started to stab the child in the chest, “maybe three or four times”. Benicio said he stopped, hit Bouchaker once in the head with his helmet and he fell to the ground.
Flynn and Benicio were among witnesses who gave evidence on Monday in the continuing trial at the Central Criminal Court of Bouchaker (52), a native of Algeria of no fixed abode, who has denied attempting to murder three children, two girls and a boy, on Parnell Square East on November 23rd, 2023.
He has also denied assault causing harm to two other children and to a passerby who intervened to assist, and assault causing serious harm to Flynn. He denied a further charge of producing a 36cm kitchen knife capable of inflicting serious injury.
The prosecution case is that Bouchaker‘s actions, including “stabbing and jabbing” with a knife, “targeting” young children and the need for members of the public to stop him, showed intent to kill.
The five-year-old girl suffered severe brain injuries and is now non-verbal and using a wheelchair, the jury heard.
Bouchaker told gardaí during interviews that he knew he had done something wrong, but was sick and not in his right mind at the time and had no intention to kill anyone. He said he was angry about being refused a social welfare payment that day and had a knife.
The accused had a head operation in 2021 and suffered a head injury during the Parnell Square incident and now has an acquired brain injury.
Before the trial, Judge Tony Hunt found Bouchaker fit to plead and the jury has been told special mental health defences are not available to him.
In evidence on Monday, Flynn told prosecuting counsel Karl Finnegan she arrived at the school about 1.33pm on the day in question to bring the children to the creche with a colleague.
She was doing up a boy’s jacket when she noticed a man who seemed to be “looking for something” in a bag and “just standing there, looking around”.
The man came towards one girl in a crouched motion and as he got closer, came in “very hurriedly”. She saw the “silver bit” of a knife and the man “ferociously jabbing”. She did not know how many times he jabbed but “it was multiple” and most of these seemed to get the girl. The man was also “slashing” with the knife, she said.
She shouted and ran at him and grabbed him from behind. He was still trying to continuously jab but she pulled him back from the children.
During a struggle, he stabbed her in the back but she did not know this the time, though she felt something “wet”.
She said the man tried to go back towards the children again, and she tried to stop him. She said she screamed “somebody help me, he has a knife” and other adults then intervened.
She went to the steps of a nearby hotel because she was light-headed and finding it difficult to breathe. The children were close by and she asked a woman to take them into the hotel.
She was treated for multiple injuries, including a collapsed lung and had her spleen removed. She said she had not returned to work since.
In cross-examination, counsel for Bouchaker said he was not suggesting that anyone other than the accused caused the injuries to Flynn and the children.
She agreed Bouchaker had wide-eyes, appeared frantic, looked confused and seemed to have been taken by surprise that an adult had grabbed him and that was an irrational response.
She disagreed that this meant there was something wrong with him.
When Flynn saw him “swinging” the knife after the little girl was stabbed, her impression was that it was to cause harm to the children. She agreed it was possible that other children were injured accidentally.
Cathal Faughnan, a clinical nurse manager, said he was walking down Parnell Square East on November 23rd, 2023, when he saw a man with a knife “physically going up and down a line of kids, like he wanted to get every kid in the line”.
Another man grabbed the knife and threw it across the road, other people gathered around and a man brought the assailant to the ground.
He later assessed a boy who had a small laceration on his neck and a girl with lacerations to the top part of her head.
Under cross-examination, he said it seemed to him there were eight or nine children in a line but he had not said Bouchaker had stabbed eight or nine children.
“It looked like he was going for every child, to get at every kid who was there,” Faughnan said.
When counsel said it was a “horrifying” knife and its “capacity to kill was obvious”, Faughnan said he believed the attacker “wanted to get at the kids to do them harm”.
He agreed that he told gardaí every strike was to the upper body and a strike to the upper body of a child with such a knife would almost certainly be “catastrophic”.
In his evidence, Benicio said his motorbike helmet slipped from his hands and fell into a basement after he hit Bouchaker on the head once with it.
“He saw me coming but one hand was with the girl and the other with the knife and he could not defend himself. I hit him on the head,” he said.
The man fell to the ground and he also gave him two or three punches, Benicio said.
When he realised the man could not react, and saw blood coming from his mouth, he stepped back. Some other people started to kick Bouchaker but some women stood around him to protect him. He said everyone stepped back after a woman said ‘we are not savages here’.
Under cross-examination, Benicio accepted there were some differences between his statement to gardaí and his evidence.
There were “flashes” but there were “some things I am sure about”, that the man grabbed and stabbed a girl, and the woman was protecting the kids, he said.
Erica Hernon, in evidence, said she was in a car with her husband on Parnell Square when she saw a woman trying to get children in a line and a man “hovering” nearby.
She saw the man with a knife in his hand, the knife seemed to be up in the air, she thought the woman had “gone into fight mode” and was trying to stop him.
Hernon saw a little girl being picked up high by the man and the knife pointed towards her throat, she said.
She said shouted in the car “he has a knife” and that her husband stopped driving and phoned 112.
She rolled down the window and said “he has a knife” because a lot of people were running towards him.
Hernon saw a bald man rugby tackle the man to the ground and a helmet “like a motorcycle helmet” in the sky before a bus blocked her view.
The trial continues on Tuesday before the judge and a jury of nine men and three women.
