The special assize court of Paris condemned on appeal Friday the Algerian Hamou Benlatreche to 30 years of imprisonment accompanied by a security period of two thirds, for having mowed down six soldiers with his vehicle in 2017, confirming the verdict of first instance.
The court convicted Mr. Benlatreche of all the charges against him, namely "attempted murder of persons holding public authority in relation to a terrorist enterprise", but did not follow the requisitions of the general prosecutor's office who had demanded the maximum sentence, that is to say life imprisonment, against the accused.
On August 9, 2017, in Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine), driving his VTC, Hamou Benlatreche had mowed down soldiers from the Sentinel mission who were preparing to go on patrol, before fleeing and to be arrested, five hours later, on a highway near Calais (Pas-de-Calais).
Six soldiers were injured in this attack, three of them seriously.
The court presided over by Emmanuelle Bessone, a seasoned magistrate in terrorism cases, accompanied her conviction with a permanent ban from French territory for the accused at the end of his sentence.
At first instance, Mr. Benlatreche, 42, had already been sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment with a two-thirds security period.
"Thank you Madam President," said Mr. Benlatreche, in French, when the verdict was announced.
"He is violent, uncontrollable, revolted against everything we are and is not about to change," said the representative of the public prosecutor's office in his requisitions in the morning. "We are dealing with a real madman," insisted the magistrate.
Denouncing "particularly cowardly and odious facts", the Advocate General Manon Brignol - also accustomed to the trials of jihadists - estimated that there was in Mr. Benlatreche "the desire to create a mass killing".
She underlined the "extreme dangerousness" of the accused who appeared in a wheelchair since the bullet wounds received during his arrest.
"Do not be moved by his disability," she told the court, recalling the forty disciplinary incidents of which Mr. Benlatreche has been guilty since the start of his detention.
- "Social death penalty" -
“Perpetuity amounts to a social death penalty,” pleaded for his part Mr. Benlatreche’s lawyer, Me Sébastien Garnier.
"We're going to lock it up, we're going to throw away the key and we're going to forget it... It's hard to hear, it's hard to take it," he said before the court retired to deliberate
During his appeal trial, Mr. Benlatreche, who suffers from a brainstem cavernoma, a serious malformation of the blood vessels of the brain, categorically denied having intended to run into the military, explaining that he had "unease" on board his vehicle.
He said he had "suddenly woken up" after the impact "against a car or a tree" and had spun, fearing that the soldiers would "shoot him".