Killer took victim for someone else

A MAN who killed another person in 2010 by pushing him under a train has told a court he did it because he mistook him for someone else.

Ahmed Konkobo, on trial for murder at the Paris assizes criminal court, explained he thought his victim was a different Asian man with whom he had a dispute earlier.

He told the court he had gone into the RER station at the Gare de Lyon intending to urinate there and got into a fight with a man who was waiting for a train with a bike. “Just as I wanted to pee, he kept looking at me,” he said. “There was an exchange of blows and then I gave up and left.”

Video footage shows the incident and that the Asian man then got into a train. Soon afterwards it shows Konkobo returning and giving a violent kick to a 51-year-old cleaner who was waiting for a train with his hands in his pockets.

“I didn’t hear the RER, I kicked him without wanting to push him, he said. “I took him for someone else; the first victim.”

Asked if what was shown on the video footage was “serious”, he agreed it was.

He said it would not have happened if he had not been drinking that day.

He was jailed for 16 years.

Konkobo, 31, had been in treatment since 2005 after a schizophrenia diagnosis and has had several stays in psychiatric hospitals. He had interrupted his treatment a few months before the incident.

His mother had asked her son’s psychiatrist that he be forcibly hospitalised, but he had refused. The doctor will be heard in court next week.
Photo: Eole99 Wikimedia Commons