2023-11-02 16:44:58
He was also banned from practicing for one year and sentenced to one year of ineligibility. The imam of the Beaucaire mosque, in Gard, received a suspended prison sentence of eight months this Thursday in Nîmes for advocating terrorism and provoking hatred or violence, in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arrested during the night from Monday to Tuesday and placed in pre-trial detention, the 32-year-old defendant, tried in immediate appearance before the Nîmes criminal court, was prosecuted for having published comments on Facebook on October 12 from a hadith (word attributed to Muhammad and recorded in Islamic tradition). “You will fight the Jews and have the upper hand over them so that the stone will say: O Muslim! Here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come kill him,” he posted.
“I had misunderstood this hadith,” the imam justified himself at the bar. “I would not have published it if I had seen this ambiguity. To err is human, it is clumsiness on my part,” he repeated several times, arguing, during a long tirade, that he was “against all forms of terrorism” and that he was “on the side of the oppressed, whatever side they may be on.”
Arrested on return from a pilgrimage to Mecca
“There is no ambiguity about the nature of this publication, posted by a literate person, endowed with an important aura due to his position, on a public account of a social network”, estimated Vincent Edel, for the public prosecutor, recalling that these facts took place “at a time when there were abuses between Palestinians and Israelis”.
Father of four children, of Franco-Moroccan nationality, the religious was arrested at Marseille-Marignane airport, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, then placed in police custody Monday evening, after denunciation by the prefect of Gard, Jérôme Bonet, under article 40 of the code of criminal procedure.
Imam of the Beaucaire mosque, a Gard commune headed by Julien Sanchez, vice-president of the RN, the defendant, who has been practicing since 2014, had previously served in the mosques of Valdegour then Chemin bas d’Avignon, two impoverished districts of Nîmes.
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