The trial opened around 9:30 a.m. (07:30 GMT) at the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona (south), in the presence of the young woman, 28 at the time of the events, surrounded by police.
Dressed in black, as stipulated by the court rules, the accused wore a long tunic, tights and ballet flats, as well as, at the start of the hearing, a sanitary mask (also black) and a hood covering her head. and that she agreed to remove after several minutes of discussions with the president of the court and her lawyer.
“I’m a Muslim,” she said, a slight smile on her face, to justify her desire to keep the hood on, before complying with the court rules.
On November 24, 2020, she went up to the 5th floor, household department, of the Manor department store in Lugano, in the Italian-speaking region of the country, where she bought a knife before randomly attacking two women.
One of the two victims was seriously injured in the neck. The second, injured in the hand, had managed to control the assailant with other people, until the arrival of the police.
According to the indictment of the Public Ministry of the Confederation (MPC, Attorney General), the young woman, whose name the court does not want to be published, acted “intentionally” and “without any scruples”.
During the attack, she repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “I will avenge the Prophet Muhammad”, and declared “I am here for IS”, in reference to the jihadist group Islamic State.
During this first morning of hearing, the young woman, long black hair, answered at length the answers of the president of the court.
From a Swiss father and a Serbian mother, she recounted, in a naturally broken voice, her epileptic seizures during childhood followed by an adolescence marked by anorexia, and these hairdressing or sales assistant internships.
– “Things went wrong” –
In contact with psychologists and psychiatrists since her childhood, she indicated that she is currently being followed in prison, where she is taking a treatment that she does not like and which makes her “nervous”.
She explained that she became pregnant at 17 from her future husband, of Afghan origin, whom she married at 19 and from whom she ended up divorcing last year.
“It started well, then things got bad,” she said, explaining that her husband didn’t want her to study or have an abortion.
Not wishing to take care of the unborn child, she entrusted him to his parents, who adopted him.
She is on trial for “repeated assassination attempts” and violation of the article of federal law prohibiting the jihadist groups Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
In particular, she is accused of wanting to commit a “terrorist act” in the name of IS. She must also answer the charge of “repeated illicit exercise of prostitution” between 2017 and 2020.
The defense assured that it would rely on his mental state to refute the “terrorist” motive and plead an attempted homicide. Experts are to be heard during the day and on Tuesday.
She was already known to the police before the attack, because she had tried to join a jihadist fighter in Syria, whom she had fallen in love with on the networks in 2017. She had been arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border and sent back to Switzerland then placed in a psychiatric institution.
The hearing is scheduled to last until Thursday, and judgment is expected on September 19.
Switzerland has never experienced a large-scale jihadist attack but two knife attacks in 2020: a few weeks before Lugano, a young Turkish-Swiss national, who had sought to travel to Syria in 2019, had fatally stabbed a passerby in a street in Morges (west).
