The fifty-year-old seriously injured in a fight during the Bayonne Festival died on Tuesday evening, the city’s prosecutor’s office announced in a press release on Wednesday. “Last night, the victim of these criminal acts unfortunately died at the Côte Basque Hospital, where she had been receiving treatment since her hospitalization on July 11,” said public prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier.
The victim had been violently hit on the head last Thursday evening and had been taken to hospital in a “very serious condition”, the prosecutor said at a press conference on Saturday.
His attacker, arrested the day after the incident, was charged with “attempted homicide” and placed in pretrial detention, the prosecutor announced. Aged 39, he is well known to the police and justice services. He has been convicted multiple times for violence and had just been released from detention in April, according to Jérôme Bourrier.
Two “violent blows to the face”
A violent altercation broke out between the two men shortly after 9 p.m. on a bus at the bus station set up for the Bayonne Festival. The versions differ, but according to the initial elements of the investigation, the victim, aged 58, was drunk. The tests revealed that he had 1.87 g of alcohol per litre of blood.
He allegedly insulted the accused, a Frenchman from Guadeloupe who mentioned racist remarks, added Jérôme Bourrier. The victim’s partner, interviewed by investigators, denied the racist remarks. Despite attempts to calm the driver and the transport company’s regulator, the pressure continued to mount, the two men got off the bus and the accused rushed towards the fifty-year-old. After two “violent blows to the face”, the latter fell to the ground.
The man was taken to hospital as an emergency, suffering from “serious head trauma with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhage, associated with a maxillofacial fracture,” Jérôme Bourrier explained.
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