A prayer ceremony was held in the Malian capital Bamako on Thursday for a 22-year-old man who was stabbed to death in a mosque in the south of France.Aboubakar Cisse was stabbed dozens of times while praying in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe on April 25.Olivier Hadzovic, a 20-year-old French national of Bosnian origin, is suspected of carrying out the attack.Relatives and officials who attended the ceremony, called on French authorities to ensure justice is done.”I lost my first son today,” Cisse’s mother, Fatoumata Diagouraga, told AFP after the ceremony. “I take comfort in seeing that, beyond myself, the condemnation has been worldwide. It eases my pain as a mother.”Hadzovic is suspected of stabbing Cisse 57 times and filming him as he writhed in agony.He surrendered to police in Italy three days after the attack and is awaiting extradition to France.”Aboubakar had promised to visit me during the holidays, and I had started composing songs for the occasion,” Diagouraga said.Cisse’s body was repatriated to Mali on Thursday morning.A funeral prayer at the local mosque, where his family lives, followed by a prayer ceremony at the cemetery in the Garantigibougou neighbourhood of Bamako.Cisse, originally from the Kayes region in southwestern Mali, was born in 2003 and moved to France as an unaccompanied minor around 15 years later.He will be buried in his hometown on Thursday.”Since this tragedy, the government has remained mobilised alongside the Cisse family,” Mali’s Minister for Malians Abroad, Moussa Ag Attaher, told AFP.”We want to see the French authorities invest themselves so that justice is served” and “shed full light on this case,” he added.Sory Kaba Diakite, the Consul General of Mali in Lyon in eastern France, told AFP that “the entire Malian community in France — of all faiths — had mobilised and condemned” the murder.”I was able to meet with French authorities who assured me that justice will be done,” he said.Mali’s Minister for Religious Affairs, Mahamadou Kone, said the mruder should no be used “set one religion against another, or one population against another”.”This is a tragedy condemned by all sensible minds,” he said.Cecile Gensac, the prosecutor in the southern French city of Nimes, said Hadzovic had been “driven by a fierce desire to kill someone and failing that, to commit suicide”.Hadzovic admitted to killing Cisse in his first statement to Italian investigators but, according to his lawyer, denied acting from hatred of Islam, saying he had “killed the first person he found” in his path.lar-bdi-els-lp/rlp/srg
