In 2006 a Paris appeal court sentenced Kamel Daoudi, who held dual French and Algerian nationalities, to six years in prison after he was convicted of taking part in an al-Qaeda plot to attack the US embassy in the French capital in 2001.
Daoudi was stripped of his French nationality and banned from France, and was ordered to be deported. But that expulsion order was overturned, in accordance with the advice of the European Court of Human Rights, because of the risk of mistreatment and even torture if he returned to his native country.
Having already served time in prison before his appeal hearing (he was first convicted in 2005), he was released from jail in 2008. Because he could not be deported, he was placed under house arrest. He continues to be under house arrest today, the longest period anyone in France has ever been confined by the measure.
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The French interior ministry has ordered him on five occasions to change his place of residence, forcing his move from the centre of the country, to the north and latterly the south-west. As a result, Daoudi, 43, now lives in a hotel in the Charentes-Maritime département (equivalent to a county), more than 400 kilometres from his French wife and their three children. He is legally required to report in to the local gendarmerie station five kilometres away, at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, four times every day of the week, at 9.15am, 11.45am, 3.15pm and at 5.45pm, and must remain in his every night in his hotel room from 9pm to 7am.
Jobless, he travels to the gendarmerie on a bike, and spends most of his free time in a local café, where he has become as familiar as the furniture.
He runs the risk of a prison sentence if he does not report to the gendarmerie at the exact times he is supposed to. “When we lived in the Creuse [département in central France], I was given a six-month suspended prison sentence for being three-quarters of an hour late because I had driven my wife, who was eight months’ pregnant, to have an ultrasound scan, on a day when it was snowing,” he said.
Last November he was given hope of an easing of his conditions after his lawyer Bruno Vinay applied to France’s Constitutional Council for a lifting of the regulations that allowed for his continued his house arrest, when the council gave the authorities until next July to justify the measure.
But earlier this month, the French Senate law commission approved a proposed modification of the law concerning the right of entry, residence, and asylum rights for foreign nationals and which, amid its articles, leaves the indefinite house arrest of Daoudi legal. The bill allows for an open-ended restriction of movement to be imposed on foreign nationals who are judged to be dangerous and who cannot be returned to their native country.
That prompted Daoudi to begin a hunger strike on February 7th to highlight his case. He finally ended the protest, during which he also refused liquids, on February 13th, when he said his wife, who had travelled to watch over him, had implored him to drink water after becoming alarmed at his declining health.
“What I am submitted to by the state is harassment, a sort of white torture,” he told Mediapart, speaking shortly before beginning his protest. “I am prevented from having a family, professional and social life. All I was left with for final support was my wife and children, but even that is no longer possible.”
Asked about his daily routine of checking in at the gendarmerie four times a day, and the rest of the time waiting to go back and check in again, he said: “I try not to go mad. I speak to people, I read a lot, I also write. But in reality, house arrest is something that is much more deleterious than prison. In prison, at least, you have the perspective of the end of a sentence, and some relations with other prisoners. There are the visiting rooms, the guards. When you are placed under house arrest you are your own guard. Your personality ends up by crumbling. It is destroying.”
“It is an absurd life, the same each day, like in the film Groundhog Day. It is a mental prison, without bars.”
Daoudi was arrested in London at the end of September 2001, and extradited to France where he would spend six years and six months in prison, beginning with his preventive detention when he was accused, and later convicted of, “associating” with a terrorist group planning to bomb the US embassy in Paris. Daoudi denied the charge.
Among others also arrested and eventually convicted was fellow Algerian Djamel Beghal, the suspected ringleader of the plot, with whom Daoudi lived in the Paris suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes. The arrests followed Beghal’s confession of the bomb plot when, travelling back to Europe from Pakistan via Dubai in July 2001, he was detained and questioned for several days before being extradited to France. He later claimed he gave his confession under duress.
After Beghal served time for his part in the plot, he became an influential figure for Amedy Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi, described by the Paris prosecution services as his “pupils”, who would in January 2015 lead the shooting massacres in Paris against Charlie Hebdo magazine and the kosher store Hyper Kacher.
Asked what his view now is about his earlier life, Kamel Daoudi told Mediapart: “This might cause shock, but my path was of the same type as an anti-fascist militant who went off to fight during the Spanish civil War. In the 1970s, it could have been the far-left. It’s simply a different universe.”
“When I was young, the interventions in Afghanistan, in Libya or Iraq created a form of extremely unhealthy humiliation,” added Daoudi, who was 27 when he was arrested in 2001 over the plot against the US embassy and who had earlier travelled that year to Afghanistan in the company of Beghal. “At the time, I had family and professional difficulties, and I left for Afghanistan on sudden impulse, I stayed there four months.” He says he has changed since. “Islam defines me in part, but not entirely. I have lived in France since the age of five, and I have married a woman of French stock, the daughter of an officer who was decorated several times, and we have had three children.”
Daoudi argues that his views are complex, and that his personality should not be reduced to that of a convicted terrorist, nor the disowning of the radical and deadly engagements of his younger years. He says his childhood was within a family with a “traumatic” history. “I am an Algerian national. My father was tortured by the French army [before the former French colony Algeria became independent] when he was aged 15. My grandfather died in bombing by the French army, and his body wasn’t found. I have a traumatic family past.”
Daoudi, a practicing Muslim who says he doesn’t “spill forth on the issue”, says he would simply like to lead an ordinary life in France. Compared to now, his life was an easier one when he first moved to Carmaux, a small town in the Tarn département in south-west France, which he was ordered to move from at the end of 2016. “With my wife, we bought a house, we were well integrated,” he recalled. But, he says, after a jihadist stabbed to death a police officer and his partner in Magnanville, west of Paris, in June 2016, followed by the terrorist attack in Nice in July 2016, when a Tunisian jihadist drove a truck into Bastille Day crowds killing 87 people, his close neighbours, a couple who were both police officers turned against him.
“They wrote everywhere to say that I was dangerous, to the town hall, the police station, the prefecture,” he said. “They launched a petition, rousing everyone. I was even barred from dropping my child off at the nursery. In the end, there was a police search of my home. They found nothing but it was traumatic for my wife and my children.” Daoudi said his computer was taken away and a police van was stationed outside his house for two months. At the end of 2016 he was ordered to move to Saint-Jean-d’Angély. “My wife is a teacher, she took out debts to buy the house in Carmaux and she cannot follow me [here].”
Daoudi’s lawyer, Bruno Vinay, has repeatedly sought an easing of the Algerian’s conditions with applications to the interior ministry and administrative courts, but so far in vain. “For the administration, he is [regarded as] dangerous for life, eternally a suspect,” said Vinay. “He is marked with a branding iron. In fact, he is denied the right to amend his ways.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse