On Thursday, November 17, 2022, a court in Porto, in northern Portugal, handed down a seven-year prison sentence to Anas Kataya, a 22-year-old student at the University of Brest. In addition to the prison sentence he will serve in Portugal, the court also ordered him to compensate the parents of the victim, a 23-year-old Portuguese boy, with €202,000. The young man who is currently in detention has appealed against this verdict.
Anas Kataya is a former student at the Faculty of Medicine in Brest. He joined the dental sector between 2018 and 2019, joined the University of Porto as part of the Erasmus exchange programme. At the time of the events, he was no longer a faculty member of the University of Western Brittany.
“Heavy punches to the head.”
The facts go back to October 2021. As a queue appears at the entrance to a nightclub in the center of Porto, the tone rises among young Portuguese and young French women. In addition to insults, the latter was pulled by his hair, he said Audience report from the local Portuguese press, citing Ouest-France. Then they reported their adventure to their French friends, and signaled the attackers.
According to the prosecution, the group, which included Anas Kataya, deliberately contacted the Portuguese “for the sole purpose of attacking them”. While the victim was trying to flee to avoid confrontation, the former student from Brest pursued him and hit him with “severe punches in the head”, before abandoning the “inanimate victim on the ground”, according to the indictment.
“He didn’t want to kill.”
The presiding judge ruled out the existence of premeditation, stressing that the accused, who had a clean criminal record, was not guilty, “but a student who was involved in a fight between students. He did not want to kill, he wanted to attack. But this does not remove the assaults on Physical safety, which is exacerbated by death.
In the indictment, the public prosecutor had waived the aggravated murder clause, and requested that the accused be sentenced to eight years in prison “for bodily harm aggravated as a result of death.” Note that another French defendant in this case was sentenced to ten months in prison for attacking another young man with a bottle.
