Attack foiled before Euro 2016: Sentenced to 24 years in prison, Réda Kriket will be retried – AFP
Réda Kriket, sentenced Friday in Paris to 24 years of criminal imprisonment for a plan of jihadist attack foiled in 2016, will be retried, the prosecution having appealed against his conviction, we learned Thursday from the national anti-terrorism prosecution (Pnat ).
He will be tried again alongside four other men, including Anis Bahri and Abderrahmane Ameuroud, both also sentenced to the same sentence of 24 years imprisonment, with a two-thirds security period.
Kriket, Bahri and Ameuroud, a “maneuvering trio”
The Pnat had demanded life imprisonment against Réda Kriket, Anis Bahri and Abderrahmane Ameuroud, presented as “the trio in charge” of a project of attack which “promised to be murderous”, commissioned according to the accusation by the Islamic State (IS).
On March 24, 2016, two days after the attacks in Brussels, the police seized an arsenal “of unprecedented magnitude” from accommodation rented for eight months under a false name by Réda Kriket in Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise): thirteen weapons including five assault rifles, a quantity of ammunition, explosives, as well as thousands of metal balls.
Réda Kriket says he wanted to “engage in banditry”
Réda Kriket, a 39-year-old ex-offender, has always opposed any plan for a terrorist attack. Before the special assize court, which tried him for five weeks, he claimed to have wanted to “engage in banditry”.
The court recognized the three main defendants, with the “old and protean jihadist commitment”, guilty of having planned an attack in France, excluding that the arsenal discovered in Argenteuil could correspond to a “robbery project”.
However, it considered that “there is no evidence (allowing) to affirm that it was an attack directly projected from Syria by the Islamic State organization”. For professional magistrates, it is “by no means proven” that Réda Kriket and Anis Bahri were, in January 2015, “passed through Syria with the aim of preparing an attack sponsored by the Islamic State”.
The judgment also underlines the “many persistent gray areas” of the file and the fact that it “was not possible to determine with precision the nature of the attack (s) envisaged”, nor what were “the projected targets ”, the“ moment ”, the“ number of terrorists involved ”or even the“ modus operandi ”.