The Paris court sentenced, Tuesday, October 12, Logan Nisin, the founder of the ultra-right group OAS, to nine years of imprisonment with continued detention. The prosecution had requested ten years’ imprisonment against him. The court also recognized five other defendants, aged 23 to 33, guilty of “terrorist criminal association”, pronouncing in particular an eight-year prison sentence with a committal warrant for Thomas Annequin, number 2 of the small group Organization social armies.
Logan Nisin was arrested at the end of June 2017 in the Bouches-du-Rhône and indicted in July 2017 for criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist company. He threatened to attack migrants, Muslim places of worship and politicians. He had thus imagined targeting Christophe Castaner and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
“Far from a fantasized political project”, the “new OAS” was designed in “tracing the structure of the Secret Army Organization of 1961”, a politico-military group responsible for a bloody repression in the 1960s against the independence of Algeria, estimated the president of the chamber when reading his judgment. In this file, “everything attests to the imminence of the passage to the act”, “The OAS was created as a defense army ready if necessary to destabilize the institutions”, “to fracture the social body”, continued the magistrate, recalling his “calls for rebellion”, his “incitement to kill” or his corporate racketeering projects to finance weapons.
Throughout the two weeks of the trial, the members of the group assured that they would never have taken action, by returning the responsibility to its founder Logan Nisin. “Their personal responsibility cannot be diluted in a disembodied global strategy: they have all, and collectively, embodied the OAS”, ruled the court, finding them all guilty.
The decision of the Paris Criminal Court was eagerly awaited since the OAS case is the first to be tried out of the seven investigations opened by the anti-terrorist prosecution since 2017 concerning plans for ultra-right attacks.
In her indictment, the prosecutor urged the court to measure the “significant impact” of her judgment, which she wanted exemplary to counter the “exceptional rise in power of the threat brought by the ultra-right movement”.
Since 2017, 48 people have been indicted by the anti-terrorism prosecution in plans for attacks attributed to the ultra-right. Terrorism the prosecutor compared to Islamist terrorism, describing “two sides of the same fanatic coin”.
Gabriel Dumenil, who defends Romain Pugin sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison, described a “severe judgment”. “The legal qualification, in particular of terrorism, does not appear at all so clear. It is about a judgment which was delivered to mark a jurisprudential position with regard to future trials”, he estimated with AFP.