A childcare assistant has told a court she saw Riad Bouchaker ‘ferociously jabbing’ and ‘slashing’ with a knife at the young children in her care whom he was ‘hellbent’ on getting to – before she herself was stabbed as she fought to pull him away.

Leanne Flynn, 38, who spent a month in hospital recovering from her serious injuries, and who has not worked since, was praised for her ‘extraordinary courage’ by Mr Bouchaker’s defence barrister.

At the start of his cross-examination, the barrister said he wanted her to know that he was not suggesting that anyone else ‘caused the knife injury you suffered other than Riad Bouchaker’.

He said he was also not suggesting to her or the jury that the knife injuries suffered by the children were ‘occasioned by anyone other than Riad Bouchaker’.

Mr Bouchaker, 52, of no fixed address, has pleaded not guilty to attempting to murder two girls and a boy at Parnell Square in Dublin on November 23, 2023.

He has also denied assaulting a childcare worker, two other children and a passer-by who intervened, and has pleaded not guilty to possessing a knife.

One girl, who was five years old at the time, was stabbed in the heart, and now requires a wheelchair and can communicate only through blinking, the court has heard.

Ms Flynn told Mr Bouchaker’s trial at the Central Criminal Court that November 23 had begun as a normal day, with her starting her shift at the creche attended by the children at around 1pm.

She said she had worked there since 2016. At 1.28pm, having set up the after-school room at the creche, she walked the three or four minutes to the nearby Gaelscoil to meet a colleague and collect a group of children.

She said the children would not be released until the teacher saw the creche workers. They would then line up by the railings of the school, with junior infants paired with senior infants.

Asked by prosecuting barrister Karl Finnegan if anything had grabbed her attention, she said she had seen a man, dressed in dark clothing, standing at a nearby bus stop. She thought he had been standing there for a minute or so, she told the court, but her attention was mainly on helping a young boy fasten his coat.

‘He wasn’t moving off, he wasn’t catching a bus, he was just kind of standing there, looking around,’ she recalled. Ms Flynn told the court that as she was zipping the jacket, she noticed the man walk towards the children. ‘He came towards [a girl] in a crouched motion,’ she said. ‘As he came closer he had a knife… and he just went and started ferociously jabbing.’

Asked how many times he had ‘jabbed’ the girl, she said: ‘I honestly don’t know. Multiple.’ She continued: ‘I let out a shout, and asked him what he was doing. I told him to get away from the children, then I ran up and grabbed him from behind… by the back of his jacket.’

Asked if he said anything, she said: ‘No. He continued jabbing… I grabbed him and pulled him back away from the children.’ Ms Flynn agreed that when he turned around she got a good look at him, saying he had sallow skin, was fat, and had big eyes and dark hair.

‘He looked at me, but he looked kind of confused, as if he wasn’t expecting an adult or someone bigger to approach him. I kind of swung him, and then we were in a kind of tussle,’ she said. ‘He stabbed me in that tussle.’

She said she was stabbed in her back, on the left side, but she did not realise this at first.

‘I felt something wet but it did not register to me that I was actually hurt at that time,’ she explained. She continued: ‘He went to go back to the children again.’ She said he had ‘slashed’ at them, saying: ‘He was swinging the knife but I went over and grabbed him again.’

Some of the children had moved by this time, but others were frozen in panic, she said. ‘I let out a scream, “Somebody help me, he has a knife” and that’s when other adults intervened,’ she said. ‘I just grabbed the children and told them to run.’

She said they ran to the steps of a nearby hotel, where she told the children they were safe, and asked a staff member to take the children inside. She was getting lightheaded herself, she said.

She recalled seeing a group of people around the man, and while she could not say how many people there were, she agreed it was more than handful.

By this time she was struggling to breathe herself, and knew she had been stabbed. Ms Flynn said she did not know why the one little girl had received the brunt of the attack. She said the girl had so much blood on her that she could not tell where she had been injured.

Two other children were crying and had blood on their hands, she said. She called the creche manager and her partner, before the paramedics arrived and she was taken to the Mater Hospital.

She spent a month in hospital, with injuries including a collapsed lung, and a severed diaphragm which collapsed her other lung. Part of her spleen was removed and her stomach was also damaged, she said.

‘I was put into an induced coma and had two emergency surgeries,’ she said.

During cross-examination, Mr Bouchaker’s defence counsel said she had shown ‘extraordinary courage’ while minding the 13 children, and noted that the knife was a long one, with a blade which was longer than its handle.

He suggested to Ms Flynn that the knife’s potential to hurt young children was ‘terrifying’, and that it could have gone ‘straight through the body of a five-yearold child’.

He said: ‘Notwithstanding, you still grabbed him and probably prevented worse happening.’

He asked her how Mr Bouchaker had looked when she grabbed him, noting that he was a person who had suffered a brain injury previously, and she agreed it was a fair description to say he was wide-eyed and ‘frantic’.

He put it to Ms Flynn that it would be a ‘ridiculous, irrational response’ for someone to be surprised to be stopped if they were trying to harm children.

She said that was the impression he had given her. Ms Flynn also told the defence barrister that she did not believe Mr Bouchaker had intended to harm her.

‘The children seemed to be his main focus,’ she said. ‘Obviously, I got hurt because I intervened, but he seemed hell-bent to get to the children.’

She said she could not tell if some of the children were injured intentionally or accidentally as he swung the knife. The trial continues.