Mother of Parnell Square attack victim ‘does not feel anger’ towards Bouchaker

By Bairbre Holmes, Press Association

The mother of a little girl seriously injured in a knife attack on Parnell Square in November 2023 has said she does not feel anger towards Riad Bouchaker.

The 52-year-old was convicted at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on Wednesday of eight charges in relation to the attack, including the attempted murder of the then five-year-old girl who was stabbed in the heart.

He had denied all eight charges.

Speaking to Sky News, the mother of the girl, who can not be identified for legal reasons, said she does not feel anger towards Bouchaker as it would not “change anything”.

Describing the day of the attack, she said she received a call from her daughter’s after-school care telling her she had been stabbed.

“I remember blood being drained from my whole body, like, like I was about to pass out,” she said.

She sprinted from her workplace to Parnell Square where she found her daughter on the floor, surrounded by people trying to resuscitate her, an image she said is “burned in my memory”.

She and doctors thought her daughter would not survive the attack.

The girl has a lifelong, life-limiting severe disability after her brain was deprived of oxygen for 40 minutes following the attack.

She is non-verbal and can only communicate by blinking, uses a wheelchair and has to be fed through a tube in her stomach as she cannot swallow safely by herself.

The girl, now seven, has no memory of the attack and her mother said explaining what had happened to her was “probably one of the hardest things that I had to do”.

She added: “I just said that she got hurt, and that’s why she couldn’t move the way that she used to, or that she wanted to, or she couldn’t speak to us the way that she wanted to, or that she used to.”

Asked by reporter Stephen Murphy if she could “ever forgive” Bouchaker, she said: “I think that he has to forgive himself first.

“Right, by now I don’t know what she would be like as a five-year-old or as a six-year-old if she had progressed the natural way, and he stole that from her.”

“To be honest, I don’t know if he even understands what he did,” she added.

“I don’t think there’s anything to forgive, because I don’t think that anybody in their right state of mind would have done that.”