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A Brazilian Deliveroo driver says he saw Riad Bouchaker (52) pick up a five-year-old girl with his left arm before stabbing her up to four times in the chest with a large kitchen knife.
Caio Benecio, who was working as a Deliveroo driver in the Parnell Square area on the 23rd of November 2023, told a jury at the Central Criminal Court that he was riding his motorbike when he heard a commotion, which he initially thought was “a drug user fight”, which he said is “common” in the city centre.
Benecio said that when he got closer to the scene, he saw a woman and a man “fighting” over a little girl, saying “the big man was pulling the little girl from the woman” when he “realised something was not common”.
“I saw many people running”, he said, adding that when he got closer, “I saw the man grab the girl with his left hand, he pulled her from the woman and then I saw him with the right hand with a big, sharp knife.”
“He started to stab the girl in the chest,” he said, adding that he thought there had been “like two or four” stabs.
Mr Benecio told Carl Finnegan SC, prosecuting, that he “couldn’t run fast” because of surgery he had on his knee two months earlier, but that he had removed his helmet to “protect” himself before he “hit him [Bouchaker] in the head” with it.
He said that the accused “saw me coming” and had “one hand on the girl” and the knofe in the other so “he couldn’t defend himself do I hit him on the head.”
He said that after striking Bouchaker on the head once, the helmet “slipped” from his hands and fell into the basement area of one of the buildings.
When Mr Finnegan asked what happened after he hit Bouchaker, he said, “He fall (sic) on the floor, and then I gave him two of three punches.”
“When I realised he couldn’t react, I saw blood on his mouth, I stopped and stood back,” he said.
He described a number of other people trying “to hit and kick him” before a woman intervened, saying, “We are not savage here”.
Mr Benecio said he was “in shock” and “shaking” at this point and that he waited for Gardaí to arrive.
Counsel for Bouchaker asked the witness if he had seen the beginning of the incident outside the school, before Mr Benecio said the first thing he saw was the man “fight” with the woman.
Counsel then referred back to a statement Mr Benecio had given to Gardaí in the aftermath of the incident in which he said that he first saw the man and woman fight over one little girl who got away before he saw Bouchaker “grab another girl” whom he then stabbed in the chest.
Counsel said that he was not advancing a claim that the witness was “lying” or trying to mislead the jury, but simply that his memory may have been marred by the effects of seeing “something truly shocking”.
Different and clearly different from what you told the police, not suggesting that you’re trying to be dishonest
“Sometimes, when human beings see something truly shocking, the thing itself goes into your memory, but a lot of the background detail gets lost,” he probed.
Counsel asked Mr Benecio to describe how the suspect had stabbed the child, whereupon the witness made a physical gesture, which counsel described as “making a stabbing gesture into your own stomach area.”
“100% he was stabbing her,” Mr Benecio said, agreeing with counsel that this had featured “significant violence”.
The trial continues.
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