Farid Kharkhach, sentenced Wednesday at the trial of the November 13 attacks to two years in prison, was expelled and handed over to the Belgian authorities on Friday, we learned from the Ministry of the Interior.
The 39-year-old Belgian-Moroccan, detained for five and a half years, was on trial for having provided false papers to the jihadist cell responsible for the attacks which killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015.
He is the only one of the 20 defendants for whom the special assize court did not retain the terrorist qualification: he was convicted of criminal association with a view to committing a fraud. His sentence is the lowest pronounced. Released after the verdict on Wednesday evening, he was however placed in administrative detention in the process.
No inadmissibility
“By administrative decision and without any decision having been communicated by the prefecture (of Hauts-de-Seine) to his counsel, Mr. Kharkhach was deprived of his freedom, even before he could join his wife who had come to fetch him. in front of the Nanterre remand center ”, from Belgium where they reside, had regretted Thursday one of his lawyers, Me Fanny Vial. She had condemned “firmly” a “gratuitous and unjust humiliation”, and an “interference of the administration on the judiciary”.
Asked by AFP, the prefecture had indicated Thursday that it had pronounced against him a measure of obligation to leave the territory in February. “The law allows the prefect to take expulsion measures against foreigners (including Europeans) whose behavior represents a threat from the point of view of public order”, she had justified. The court did not pronounce a ban on French territory against Farid Kharkhach, who had been transferred to Nanterre prison last summer during the trial.