the two main accused sentenced to twenty-four and twenty-eight years of criminal imprisonment

2023-12-03 03:40:54

The two main accused of a planned attack foiled in Marseille during the 2017 presidential campaign, Clément Baur and Mahiedine Merabet, were sentenced to twenty-four and twenty-eight years of criminal imprisonment, for “terrorist criminal association” , on the night of Saturday December 2 to Sunday December 3, by the special assize court of Paris. The attorney general had requested the maximum sentence provided for by law, i.e. thirty years of imprisonment.

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This trial, which began in January, was interrupted after two weeks of hearing due to the absence of an assessor judge who had fallen ill and who could not be replaced due to a lack of sufficient numbers among the magistrates. After this false start resembling a judicial fiasco, the debates had to resume from the beginning, on October 30, forcing the accused, witnesses and investigators to return to the stand to be questioned again.

Clément Baur, 30, and Mahiedine Merabet, 36, were arrested on April 18, 2017 by the RAID in an apartment in Marseille, five days before the first round of the presidential election. The two men had themselves sealed their fate a few days earlier by sending a video of demands to a contact on Telegram messaging, who turned out to be a cyberinfiltrated agent of the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI).

Pistols, hoods, explosives

The video showed ammunition arranged in a way that wrote ” Talion’s law “next to an Uzi machine gun, a flag of the Islamic State (IS) group and the front page of Monde of March 16, 2017 dedicated to the right-wing presidential candidate, François Fillon. Upon seeing the newspaper, the investigators feared an attack against the electoral campaign and embarked on a race against time to locate their hideout.

In the apartment, they found the Uzi from the video, pistols, a GoPro camera, a balaclava, a wig, a tactical vest, bolts and 3.5 kg of TATP, a homemade explosive. They had also discovered that the two men had increased their searches for targets, at a meeting of the National Rally candidate, Marine Le Pen, scheduled for April 19, 2017 in Marseille, clubs « gays » or “libertines”and “American bar” or even a “kosher restaurant”.

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“It was a close call for the city of Marseille to experience a mass killing”had estimated, Wednesday, November 29, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office, requesting thirty years of criminal imprisonment. “They are going to manufacture TATP in quantities never before reached in a French terrorist case. Today, we cannot determine the exact target, but that does not mean that there is no planned attack: the target is indifferent, because it is indifferent for the terrorist, at the moment. that he manages to sow fear and terror. »

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