PARIS – A Parisian street preacher, a French youth who lost a forearm and an eye in Iraq, a pizza delivery man who once considered jihad – these men and four others were convicted in Paris yesterday on terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency.
The sensitive case exposed how the Iraq war has drawn in radical youths from neglected corners of Europe to battlefields where, police fear, they could learn skills to stage terror attacks back home.
The seven men – five Frenchmen, an Algerian and a Moroccan, all between 24 and 40 years old – were sentenced to between 18 months and seven years in prison. They were convicted of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,” a broad charge that carries a maximum 10-year prison term.
Most acknowledged going to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 or planning to go, but all denied accusations that they were involved in a cell recruiting French fighters for Iraq's insurgency.
Investigators said the network funneled about a dozen French fighters to camps linked to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They said the insurgent network sought to send more recruits before al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. At least seven French insurgents have died in Iraq, some in suicide bombings, police said. Of them, three were linked to the Paris group.
The Paris trial, which began in March, struck a nerve as it revealed how devout Muslim youths abandoned what they saw as bleak prospects in secular France for Iraqi battlefields. France strongly opposed the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq, but has long struggled against homegrown terrorism and is home to western Europe's largest Muslim population, an estimated 5 million people.
One of the defense lawyers, Martin Pradel, said yesterday's sentences went too far. Pradel said the court had no material evidence linking the men to a terrorist cell other than “the proclamation of their Muslim faith.” He said all seven men frequented the same mosque.
Prosecutor Jean-Julien Xavier-Rolai, who had sought harsher sentences, said he may appeal.
Judge Jacqueline Rebeyrotte singled out ringleader Farid Benyettou, 27, a janitor-turned-street-preacher, calling him “the ideologue and one of the organizers of a group whose objective was to send young people” to fight in Iraq. The judge said Benyettou recruited young men from the neighborhood for jihad, or holy war, through his extremist religious teachings and by arranging weapons training and travel through Syria to get to Iraq.
Benyettou said during the trial that the case violated his freedom of speech and that some of his statements to police were made under duress. He was sentenced to six years.
Boubakeur el-Hakim, 24, whose brother was killed in Iraq and who urged his Paris neighbors to come to Iraq in a French radio interview from Baghdad in 2003, was given a seven-year sentence, as was Moroccan Said Abdellah, 40.
