Reda Kriket is back before the specially composed Assize Court. Sentenced in April 2021 for a planned attack, this 40-year-old former multi-recidivist offender is retried from Friday in Paris alongside two other men, Anis Bahri, 38, and Abderrahmane Ameuroud, an elderly Afghan jihad veteran. 44 years old. Accused of having planned to commit a murderous attack in France, all three had been sentenced to the same sentence of 24 years’ imprisonment, accompanied by a two-thirds security sentence. But the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office, which had requested life imprisonment against the three men, had appealed.
Go back. In March 2016, four months after the November 13 attacks, DGSI investigators discovered a veritable arsenal of war in an apartment located at 185, boulevard du Général Delambre, in Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise). The police seized TATP-type explosives, chemical equipment, seven handguns, six assault rifles, tear gas canisters, eight Kalashnikov magazines, a box containing thousands of metal balls, several boxes of cartridges, switchblade knives, dozens of cell phones, one of which was connected to red wires, several passports, wave jammers, maps of Paris…
Radicalized in prison
The apartment had been rented a few weeks earlier under a false identity by a certain Réda Kriket, a 39-year-old seasoned delinquent, convicted several times in the past, and who became radicalized in prison. Watched for several days, he was arrested as he left a mosque in Boulogne-Billancourt. Three days later, several hundred kilometers away, one of his accomplices, Anis Bahri, 37, was arrested in the Netherlands at the request of the French authorities. During a search, the Dutch police found in an accommodation in Rotterdam several kilos of ammunition.
On the other hand, the DNA of Abderrahmane Ameuroud had been found in the Argenteuil apartment. The man has been known to the intelligence services since the 1990s. At the time, he organized training in the forest of Fontainebleau, in Normandy or in the Alps, intended to prepare those who wanted to go to Afghanistan to do jihad and fight in the sides of the Taliban. He himself went there between July 2000 and September 2001. He was finally arrested in January 2002 and sentenced in 2005 to seven years in prison. It is also in detention, in Fresnes, that he meets Réda Kriket.
“The Euro football in the line of sight”
Shortly after the arrest of Réda Kriket, the former Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, had declared that the cell “surely had the Euro football in its sights”, a competition which took place between June 10 and July 10 in France. But the main defendant has always disputed any planned terrorist attack. During his first trial, he explained that he wanted to commit a robbery. A thesis excluded by the court ruling at first instance, because of the extent of the arsenal discovered on March 24, 2016, two days after the attacks in Brussels.
Insisting on the “many persistent gray areas” of the case, the court had nevertheless noted in its judgment that neither the nature of the attacks envisaged, nor the targets, nor the “time” could be determined “with precision”. The magistrates also considered that there was nothing to confirm “that it was an attack directly planned from Syria by the Islamic State organization”. According to them, it was “in no way proven” that Reda Kriket and Anis Bahri had, in January 2015, “passed into Syria with the aim of preparing an attack sponsored” by Daesh.
The three men, who face life imprisonment, will have five weeks to explain themselves. Contacted by 20 minutesRéda Kriket’s lawyer, Me Yassine Bouzrou, did not respond to our requests.