Child injured in Parnell Square attack answers questions by blinking, court told

By Cillian Sherlock, Press Association

A mother asked doctors if her daughter was dead after she was stabbed in an attack in Dublin in 2023, a court has been told.

The trial of 52-year-old Riad Bouchaker, of no fixed address, opened before the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on Wednesday.

He is charged with the attempted murder of two girls and one boy, and assault causing serious harm to a care worker, at Parnell Square East in Dublin City on November 23 2023.

The mother of one of the girls told the court on Tuesday that her daughter had just turned five and was in junior infants – the first year of school in Ireland – at the time of the incident.

The court heard the child is now in a wheelchair and is “non-verbal”, answering yes or no questions by blinking.

After describing to the court what had mostly been a regular day on November 23rd, 2023, the woman said she received a call from her daughter’s afterschool at 1.45pm.

The afterschool workers would normally pick up her daughter from her actual school at 1.30pm every day and there would normally not be any contact.

On seeing the call, she said her first thought was that something was wrong and that her daughter “had a fall or something”.

She told the jury the afterschool owner was in tears and said “oh my god” and told her her daughter “has been stabbed”.

The jury heard the woman immediately started running to the scene and discovered a police cordon and emergency responders near the school.

She said the first thing she saw when she got through the cordon was the accused, Bouchaker, being put in an ambulance.

The woman said a Garda approached her and said they were “currently working on” her daughter.

She told the jury she said she told them to continue.

She said: “I could see just past her school entrance, I could see there was a crowd of five EMTs.

“They were surrounding her, I could see her pink backpack and her pink shoes.”

The woman said she said she “couldn’t do anything for her at that moment”.

She had called her partner to get him to come and also contacted her mother to “start praying”.

At Temple Street hospital, she explained that doctors told her that they were trying to control blood loss and “regain life into her”.

“I said ‘just keep working, don’t stop what you’re doing to tell us, just keep working’.”

However, she told the court that the first question she asked was: “Is she dead?”

The woman explained her daughter suffered injures to her heart and had been without oxygenation to her brain for around 40 minutes.

She said this caused “severe damage to her brain”.

The court heard her daughter was in ICU for three weeks but was not in an induced coma as they wanted to understand the damage to her brain.

They had performed emergency heart surgery and there were staples around her heart.

Her injuries saw her suffer some seizures and “major damage in her motor skills”.

Asked by prosecuting barrister Karl Finnegan SC about her daughter’s current condition, the woman said she is currently in a wheelchair and she is non-verbal.

“She is learning how to swallow. Her nutrition is all through a tube in her stomach and she is now able to answer yes or no through blinking.

“So, we ask her yes or no questions and she blinks to give us the best of her answers.”

The woman explained she had dystonia, which she described as a “condition that causes her muscles to do the absolute opposite of what we want them to do”.

For example, she said that if she wanted to move her hand out her muscles “will actually do the opposite”.

She said her daughter cannot go to the toilet by herself nor reach for anything by herself.

She said her daughter had to take medication to fall asleep.

The trial continues.