Judge tells jury of alternative verdicts available in Dublin stabbing trial

By Gráinne Ní Aodha, Press Association

Alternative verdicts are available in the three attempted murder charges facing a man on trial in relation to a stabbing in Dublin three years ago, the judge has told jurors.

Riad Bouchaker, 52, of no fixed address, is charged with the attempted murder of two girls, aged five and six, and one five-year-old boy, on Parnell Square East in Dublin city centre on November 23rd 2023.

Bouchaker is also charged with intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to care worker Leanne Flynn, with assaulting two young children and a teenager and with producing a 36cm kitchen knife.

He has pleaded not guilty to all eight charges.

Bouchaker is charged with the attempted murder of a then-five-year-old girl who the court previously heard is now non-verbal and needs to use a wheelchair.

Mr Justice Tony Hunt told the jury that in this case, along with verdicts of guilty or not guilty, they could return a verdict of “intentionally or recklessly caused serious harm”.

He said that verdicts of assault causing harm were open to them in the case of the other two attempted murder charges, relating to a five-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl.

Mr Hunt said that to find someone guilty of attempted murder, it “must be an attempt to kill someone” and not an attempt to frighten and not an attempt to cause serious harm.

He said the level of injury is not “decisive” on whether it was an attempted murder or not, but it can be a factor in the decision.

He said the act must be “cheek by jowl with an actual killing, not something more distant than that” to be attempted murder.

He said the jury must also determine that at the time of the actions, “the accused had a specific intention to kill” as opposed to an intention to frighten or injure.

He said there is no machine that can be applied “to somebody’s head and divine an intention” and instead they must assess intention as a matter of inference through primary and secondary facts.

“You must assess the evidence; you must assess the facts and the inference that can be drawn from the evidence” as to what purpose Bouchaker had and whether he had the purpose of killing those mentioned in the attempted murder charges.

In relation to the charge of assault causing harm to a teenager, Mr Hunt said the teenager “took a risk” through his intervention but urged the jury not to see this “as a form of consent”.

He said because “you run a risk of defending someone else doesn’t mean you are consenting” to a potential assault, and said the nick of a knife was “certainly capable of constituting harm”, and that it was “a matter for you to decide if it is beyond a reasonable doubt”.

He encouraged them to question if there was an interference to the person, whether it was unlawful, direct or indirect, whether it involved the application of force, and if it did, did the accused act intentionally or recklessly in the application of force.

He said it was “perhaps not the most serious issue, but it has its own gravity”.

He said in relation to the eighth charge, of possession of a kitchen knife, that if they were not satisfied with an attempted murder verdict, but were satisfied there was an “assault-type” offence, it would not “preclude” a conviction on this charge.

Giving a summary of the evidence, Mr Hunt said the CCTV footage was a useful “yardstick” to measure the accuracy of other evidence.

He said by his count there were 16 witnesses in this case, which offered a “good” example of how memory is “hugely subject to fallibility” and of people “genuinely doing their best but not being accurate”.

He said that “nobody was expecting to be confronted with anything of this kind”, which he called “shocking and horrendous” and which was “relevant in assessing what people saw”.

He said that, according to the CCTV footage, the time between Bouchaker “moving in” and the intervention of others lasted around 15 seconds, but encouraged the jury to do their own count of the CCTV timestamps.

Mr Hunt said he would conclude his charge to the jury in the afternoon.