After more than seven hours of deliberation, the Special Assize Court of Paris delivered its verdict. Abdalla El Hamahmi, the man who attacked soldiers with a machete at the Carrousel de Louvre in 2017, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison. The president of the court Laurent Raviot specified that this sentence pronounced against this Egyptian of 33 years is accompanied by a period of safety of two thirds.
A definitive ban from French territory was also ordered, as was the registration of the assailant in the file of perpetrators of terrorist offenses (Fijait). The five professional magistrates followed the requisitions of the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) which had requested 30 years of criminal imprisonment. When the verdict was announced, which was simultaneously translated into Arabic by an interpreter, Abdalla El Hamahmi, his face covered by the anti-Covid protective mask, showed no reaction.
“Contradictions” and “gray areas”
On the morning of February 3, 2017, in the Louvre shopping arcade, he had rushed, armed with two machetes and wearing a black t-shirt with a representation of a skull, towards a patrol of soldiers from the Sentinel device in shouting “Allah Akbar” (“God is the greatest”). One of the soldiers was injured in the scalp in the attack. The attacker was then seriously injured by retaliatory fire.
Throughout the debates before the court, the accused assured that his initial intention was to destroy masterpieces of the museum (the Venus de Milo, paintings by Leonardo da Vinci …) to protest in particular against French policy in Syria. Despite the “contradictions” and “gray areas” noted by the prosecution in his account, this commercial executive, a lawyer by training, explained that he was surprised by the presence “in this place” of the military gallery. of Sentinel and attacked them “by reflex”, specifying that he acted “like a robot”.
The attempted murder with restrained premeditation
After contesting the authenticity of a video in which he pledged allegiance to Daesh before he took action, the accused did an about-face during his trial and admitted to having wanted to join, in vain, the ranks of the jihadist organization in the Levant, before falling back on France. The attack was never claimed by Daesh.
The court “considered that the attempted murder had been committed against persons holding public authority”, in “connection with a terrorist enterprise”, specified Laurent Raviot. She also considered that this attempted murder “had been committed with premeditation”.