Italy has handed over to France the man accused of stabbing a young Malian to death in a mosque two weeks ago, a French prosecutor said Friday.Aboubakar Cisse was stabbed dozens of times while attending prayers at the mosque in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe on April 25.Olivier Hadzovic, a 20-year-old French national of Bosnian origin accused of carrying out the attack, surrendered to Italian authorities after three days on the run.”The suspect in the Grand-Combe case is being transferred today,” said Cecile Gensac, the prosecutor for the nearby city of Nimes, where authorities are investigating the stabbing as “murder aggravated by premeditation and on the grounds of race or religion”.”He was handed over to the French authorities this morning,” his Italian lawyer Giovanni Salvietti confirmed to AFP. Asked about his client’s state of mind, Salvietti said: “As usual, he is saying very little.”Hadzovic admitted to killing Cisse in his first statement to Italian investigators, but according to his lawyer he denied acting from hatred of Islam, saying he had “killed the first person he found” in his path.Gensac said on May 2 that Hadzovic had been “driven by a fierce desire to kill someone and failing that, to commit suicide”.He had told someone online he would “do it in the street” before considering attacking the mosque, Gensac said, and once inside he wrote: “He’s black. I’m going to do it.”He seemed to have “profoundly personal motives” and the crime was not being treated as “terrorist” as it was not linked to an “ideological claim”, she added.The case has sparked fierce debate over religious hatred in France, home to the European Union’s largest Muslim community, with several groups planning a protest on Sunday.”Everyone must take part in the fight to protect Muslims in France”, said Sofia Tizaoui, a member of a high school union involved in the march.A prayer ceremony was held Thursday in the Malian capital of Bamako following the repatriation of Cisse’s body.His family’s lawyers are calling for the investigation to be reclassified as a “terrorist murder”.
