At the end of an almost ten-month trial in Paris of 20 men charged with taking part or helping in the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital, in which 130 people were murdered, a panel of judges on Wednesday found 19 of them guilty as charged, handing down sentences ranging from two years to life in prison, including a minimum jail term of 30 years for Salah Abdeslam, 32, the only surviving member of the Islamic State group cell that carried out the killings.
At the end of the longest-ever trial in French legal history, a jury of magistrates on Wednesday found Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of an Islamic State group cell which murdered 130 people in a series of shooting and suicide bomb attacks in Paris in November 2015, guilty of terrorism and murder as charged, and pronounced guilty verdicts on 18 others charged with various degrees of complicity in the killings.
A Paris court on Wednesday handed 14 defendants jail sentences ranging from four years to life imprisonment for their part in helping terrorist gunmen in their shooting massacres over three days in January 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and of hostages at a Jewish supermarket, and the murder of a trainee policewoman, killing a total of 17 people.
The trial in Saudi Arabia of 11 men accused of murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi in November 2018 ended on December 23rd with the death sentence pronounced against five of the defendants. “These verdicts are the antithesis of justice: the hit men are sentenced to death, potentially permanently silencing key witnesses, but the apparent masterminds walk free,” said UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnès Callamard. In this opinion article, Mediapart Middle East specialist René Backmann denounces the lack of reaction to the verdicts from France, which the very same day loaded three armed vessels, the first in a deal for 39, onto a freighter bound for Saudi Arabia.
A Paris court handed two men jail sentences for their part in the killing of student Clément Méric, 18, during a brawl between far-right skinheads and anti-fascist militants in Paris in 2013, and which led to the banning of a number of far-right groups.
