A CHILDCARE WORKER has described the moment when Riad Bouchaker began ‘ferociously jabbing’ a group of children with a knife before she grabbed his jacket from behind and tried to pull him away.
Leanne Flynn told Mr Bouchaker’s trial today that she had lined the children up in pairs on Dublin’s Parnell Square East as she prepared to take them to a nearby crèche. She said she noticed a man approaching in a crouched position and saw him pull a knife before ‘ferociously jabbing’ towards the children multiple times.
She said: “I let out a shout and asked what he was doing and told him to get away from the children and I ran at him and grabbed him from behind.”
She said she grabbed the back of his jacket and when she pulled him away from the children, he turned around and looked at her. She said he seemed confused, ‘almost as if he wasn’t expecting an adult or someone bigger to approach him’.
She described a tussle in which she was stabbed in the back to the left side. She said she initially just felt something wet, but it didn’t immediately register that she had been injured.
Once he had stabbed Ms Flynn, she said the man “went back to try to get to the children again”. He was close to the children, she said, swinging the knife, but Ms Flynn followed him and shouted at the children to run. She said some of the children had panicked and couldn’t move while others ran up the street towards the steps of a nearby hotel.
When Ms Flynn shouted, ‘he has a knife’ and called for help, members of the public intervened. The witness grabbed the arms of any children she saw and pulled them away towards the hotel. The witness said she sat down on the steps of the hotel as she was getting lightheaded and finding it hard to breathe. She recalled seeing two children beside her, crying and with blood all over their hands.
She told the children they were safe and asked someone from the hotel to take them inside. She could see that there was a ‘big commotion’ on the street with lots of people shouting and surrounding the man who had stabbed the children.
About 10 minutes later, paramedics put Ms Flynn into an ambulance which brought her to the Mater hospital. She was put in an induced coma for emergency surgery and spent one month in hospital. When she emerged from the coma, she discovered that her lungs had collapsed, her diaphragm had been severed and surgeons had removed part of her spleen.
During cross-examination, defence counsel for Mr Bouchaker told Ms Flynn that there is no suggestion that anyone other than Mr Bouchaker caused the knife injuries that she and the children suffered. Counsel also said the knife used had an ‘utterly terrifying’ potential to cause harm and could run ‘straight through the body of a five-year-old child no problem’.
Ms Flynn agreed that when Mr Bouchaker looked at her, he seemed ‘frantic’. She also agreed that he seemed confused that she had intervened, which was an ‘irrational response’ given that in those circumstances, you would expect someone to intervene on behalf of the children.
Ms Flynn said the accused didn’t seem to be trying to stab her. She added: “The children seemed to be his main focus. I got hurt because I intervened, but he seemed hell-bent on getting the children.’
Riad Bouchaker (52), of no fixed address, is on trial at the Central Criminal Court charged with the attempted murder of two girls and one boy, and assault causing serious harm to Ms Flynn, at Parnell Square East in Dublin City on 23 November 2023.
He is further charged with assaulting two other children and an adult male and with producing a knife in a manner likely to intimidate.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial before a jury of nine men and three women is expected to last up to five weeks.
The trial continues before Mr Justice Tony Hunt and a jury of nine men and three women.