Justice came very quickly. The Afghan detained on Monday shortly after arriving from Kabul was sentenced to ten months suspended imprisonment for being released from the surveillance zone imposed on him by the Interior Ministry. According to government spokesman Gabriel Attal, he is part of the entourage of an Afghan who “would have had a link with the Taliban”, this link remaining “to be defined”.
On his arrival from Kabul in the night from Saturday to Sunday, Ahmat M., was notified with four other Afghans of an “individual measure of administrative control and surveillance”. Housed with his wife, his 3-month-old daughter and several other members of his family in a hotel in Noisy-le-Grand, Ahmat M. was prohibited from leaving this town. However, he was arrested late Monday afternoon in a grocery store in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, where he was reportedly spotted because he was not wearing a mask.
Confused arguments
Born in 1991, according to the minutes cited at the hearing, this man, who said he had been a prosecutor in Afghanistan before resuming his law studies, explained that he wanted to buy medicine because he suffered from headaches and vomiting since arriving in France. In sometimes confused remarks, he recounted having followed a man living in the same hotel who allegedly offered to buy him these drugs, without realizing that he was going to Paris. Questioned by the investigators, this man for his part said that Ahmat M. had asked him to accompany him to Paris to buy SIM cards.
Ahmat M. also hinted that he did not understand being the subject of a surveillance measure, asserting that he was absent when the commissioner came with a translator to notify him of the latter and that it was his wife who had signed the document. “This is not the case of a Taliban in France left to himself, it is the case of a man who fled his country with his wife and his three-month-old daughter” and who was arrested for to have “gone to the supermarket”, pleaded his lawyer, Me Alice Ouaknine. The representative of the prosecution had requested a “firm and dissuasive” sentence of 12 months in prison, including six months suspended.