PARIS:
A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in prison for attempting to murder two people outside the former Charlie Hebdo offices in 2020 with a meat cleaver.
When he carried out the attack, Zaheer Mahmood, 29, wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which was targeted by Islamists a decade ago for blasphemous caricatures.
The newspaper had actually evolved following the storming of its offices by two masked gunmen linked to Al Qaeda, who killed 12 people, including eight of the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.
Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived in France illegally in the summer of 2019. The court previously heard how Mahmood was influenced by radical preacher Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who had called for the beheading of blasphemers to “avenge the Prophet (Pbuh )”.
Mahmood was found guilty of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy, and was banned from ever setting foot on French soil again.
On September 25, 2020, around 11:40 a.m. (1040 GMT), Mahmood arrived in front of the former address of Charlie Hebdo.
Armed with a butcher’s cutter, he then seriously injured two employees of the Premières Lignes press agency.
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time, were on trial alongside Mahmood on charges of terrorist conspiracy for supporting and encouraging his actions.
The French capital’s special courts for minors imposed sentences on Mahmood’s co-defendants of between three and 12 years, as well as a ban on French soil for those who were adults.
All were recorded on the list of French terrorist offenders. None of the six on the dock reacted to the verdict.
Both victims were present during the sentencing, but did not wish to comment on the outcome of the trial.