After the attack at Notre-Dame in 2017 (archives) – MARTIN BUREAU / AFP
Thirty years of imprisonment of which two thirds of security. This is the verdict rendered on Monday by the Paris Court of Appeal against the jihadist Inès Madani for the failed attack on gas cylinders near Notre-Dame in September 2016. The special court of assizes confirmed the sentence imposed at first instance on the young 24-year-old woman, but this time with a security period, in accordance with the requisitions of the Advocate General.
Inès Madani, who was 19 years old at the time of the facts and who had appealed against her conviction, did not seem to react to the statement of the verdict, after nearly five hours of deliberation. In her last words to the court before it withdraws to deliberate, the accused, black jacket on white shirt, brown hair held up in a bun, assured to have “changed” and presented herself as a “repentant” . “Today, I am not the same person as five years ago”, she said, adding “(regret) sincerely” the facts and “their gravity”.
Wrong choice of fuel
His lawyers Daphne Pugliesi and Tewfik Bouzenoune had asked the court on Friday “a little hope”, with a sentence “a little below thirty years, given his full recognition of the facts, given his young age”. The Advocate General, Guillaume Portenseigne, had on the contrary considered “totally inconceivable” that Inès Madani, remained “far from deradicalization”, “could be sentenced to less than thirty years of criminal imprisonment” for this attempted “attack”. massive “.
On the night of September 3 to 4, 2016, Inès Madani and another jihadist, Ornella Gilligmann – sentenced definitively to 25 years in prison – parked a car containing six gas cylinders in front of the crowded terrace of a restaurant near Notre-Dame of Paris, and had tried to set it on fire with diesel. Only this poor choice of this fuel, hardly flammable, made it possible to avoid a deadly explosion.
Inès Madani was also sentenced for having attempted to assassinate a DGSI police officer during her run. She was arrested, a knife in her hand, on September 8, 2016 in Boussy-Saint-Antoine (Essonne).