2023-10-31 19:46:59
At the scene of the knife attack perpetrated by Khamzat Azimov, in the Opera district, in Paris, May 12, 2018. THOMAS SAMSON / AFP
At the end of five days of trial, the Paris Special Assize Court delivered its verdict in the trial of the knife attack which left one dead and several injured on May 12, 2018, in the Opera district. , in Paris.
The accused, Abdoul Hakim Anaiev, a 26-year-old Frenchman of Chechen origin, was sentenced on Tuesday October 31 to ten years of criminal imprisonment with a two-thirds security period for “terrorist criminal association” , an offense theoretically punishable by thirty years of criminal imprisonment.
The author of the attack, Khamzat Azimov, also of Chechen origin, was killed by a police officer on the evening of the incident after throwing himself at around ten passers-by at random in the streets, armed with a kitchen knife. . His best friend was therefore the only one to appear in the box, not for “complicity” – the investigation having not been able to establish that he knew precisely the killer’s plan – but for having “ideologically armed his blood brother”according to the formula of the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office, which had requested, in the morning, seventeen years of imprisonment.
Also read the story: Article reserved for our subscribers At the trial of the attack in the Opera district, the psychological injuries of the victims, the anger of a survivor
“There is no such thing as a lone wolfinsisted the public prosecutor in his indictment, there is always someone who influences. There is jihad by the sword and jihad by the pen. Khamzat Azimov and Abdoul Hakim Anaiev share the same history, a common memory, the same attraction for the Chechen jihad and for the Islamic State [EI]. But there are differences: Azimov is introverted, Anaiev has ascendancy, intellectual authority. Those who weaponize intellectually are much more dangerous in the long term than those who hold the weapon. »
The “lexical field” of the repentant
This “same story”this “common memory” haunted the five days of hearing. The Opera attack was in fact the first perpetrated in France by a man from the North Caucasus, a territory marked by two decades of war and jihad. Since then, another young Chechen refugee murdered history teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, and an asylum seeker of Ingush origin killed French teacher Dominique Bernard in a high school in Arras on October 13.
Born at the end of the first Chechen war, Abdoul Hakim Anaiev left his native land at the age of 6 and found asylum in France with his parents. It was at high school, where he was in class with the killer from the Opera district, that the Syrian conflict awakened in him the ghosts of Chechen jihad and triggered what he calls his “radicalization journey”, the jihadists having appeared to him as the defenders of oppressed peoples. The two friends then stood out, three years before the attack, by radical remarks made in class.
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