It's a good thing when lawyers step up for horrible people and start building a defense from whatever facts might help. In the wake of the terror shooting on the train heading to Paris, defense lawyer Sophie Duval now represents the shooter, Ayoub El-Khazzani, and has publicly suggested that her client was a homeless man who found the weapons and decided to engage in a simple robbery. Story from McClatchy. Vid clips, in French, featuring the lawyer are here. Excerpt:
“He doesn’t understand why this incident has taken on such great proportions,” the lawyer, Sophie Duval, told the French newspaper Le Parisien. “To me, he looks to be somebody who was very sick, somebody very weak, as if suffering from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard.”
She said El-Khazzani found the weapons he is accused of using on the train in a suitcase that he found in a park in Brussels. She said he had been sleeping in the park. The weapons he found, allegedly, included the AK-47 rifle, a pistol, nine ammunition clips and a box cutter.
She said he’d been homeless since “his identity documents were stolen in Brussels.” She said that after finding the weapons, he hatched a plan to rob the “many rich people” who would be on the train to Paris.