#bendaoud

🇫🇷 Fleury-Mérogis : Premier incident à la prison avec Jawad Bendaoud

À son arrivée en prison à Fleury-Mérogis le mercredi 12 décembre, Jawad Bendaoud est rentré dans une colère noire, menaçant de tout casser. (more…)

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Paris attacks: Key suspect Bendaoud cleared in first trial

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Jawad Bendaoud (right) is pictured in a courtroom sketch inside the Palais de Justice

A man who lent his flat to two jihadists has been cleared in the first trial over the 2015 Paris attacks.

Jawad Bendaoud, 31, was accused of harbouring Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Chakib Akrouh following the killings.

But he repeatedly denied knowing the men were attackers. He was mocked in France for pleading his innocence as he was arrested live on television.

The co-ordinated suicide bombing and mass shootings around Paris killed 130 people and wounded hundreds.

The Islamic State group said it was behind the attacks on the national stadium, bars and restaurants in the city, as well as the Bataclan concert venue.

Prosecutors had been seeking a four-year jail term for Mr Bendaoud, a drug-dealer and small-time criminal, for allegedly harbouring criminals at his flat in Saint Denis, in the north of the French capital.

More serious terrorism charges were dropped during the trial, after prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence that he knew the men were attackers.

Abaaoud, a Belgian national, is believed to have been the ringleader of the Paris attacks, and was later killed in a police raid on the Saint Denis flat. His accomplice Akrouh blew himself up during the raid.

In a video that went viral after the assaults, Mr Bendaoud insisted he was not aware they were wanted by police.

“Someone asked me for a favour, I helped them out,” he said.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Jawad Bendaoud spoke to BFMTV as he was arrested live on air in November 2015

In court, Mr Bendaoud gave an eccentric, at times buffoonish performance in court, reports the BBC’s Hugh Schofield in Paris.

“I may go one day to hell,” he said. “But it won’t be for helping terrorists because I did not know they were terrorists.”

While Mr Bendaoud was acquitted, two other defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison by the court in Paris on Wednesday.

Youssef Aitboulahcen, the brother of a woman killed in the police raid on the Saint Denis flat, was told to serve four years in prison for failing to alert authorities about a terror plot.

Mr Bendaoud’s friend Mohamed Soumah, accused of acting as an intermediary, was also jailed for five years.

The only surviving alleged perpetrator of the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, is on trial in Belgium on charges relating to his arrest there in 2016.

Paris attacks: Key suspect Bendaoud cleared in first trial

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Jawad Bendaoud (right) is pictured in a courtroom sketch inside the Palais de Justice

A man who lent his flat to two jihadists has been cleared in the first trial over the 2015 Paris attacks.

Jawad Bendaoud, 31, was accused of harbouring Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Chakib Akrouh following the killings.

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Prison protests threaten 1st trial linked to Paris attacks

PARIS/January 24, 2018(AP)(STL.News)— Protests by French prison guards are threatening to disrupt the first trial related to the deadly Islamic State attacks on Paris in 2015.

Jawad Bendaoud is scheduled to appear in a Paris court Wednesday for a much-awaited trial. He’s accused of helping two of the attackers — including the suspected ringleader — hide from police when they were the most wanted men in France.

The Nov. 13, 2015, attacks on Paris cafes, the national stadium and the Bataclan concert hall left 130 people dead in the country’s deadliest extremist violence since World War II. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility.

Bendaoud, an outspoken 31-year-old repeat offender, provided lodging to the two attackers, but has claimed he didn’t know they were two of the Paris attackers or even wanted extremists. He faces up to six years in prison if convicted.

However he may not be able to show up to trial at all. He was still in the Fresnes prison south of Paris Wednesday morning, according to Cedric Boyer, representing the Force Ouvriere union at the prison.

Boyer told The Associated Press about 200 guards are protesting outside the prison, adding that only “a handful” of workers crossed the strike picket line and went to work. Guards have been protesting around France over recent attacks by inmates, and unions have called on guards to mount a nationwide campaign to block suspects from reaching trials.

In the Paris attacks trial, Bendaoud is to be joined by two other suspects: Mohamed Soumah, accused of acting as an intermediary with Bendaoud to find lodging for the two fugitives, and Youssef Ait-Boulahcen, accused of being aware of their whereabouts and not informing the authorities.

Both have denied the accusations. Soumah faces up to six years in prison and Ait-Boulahcen up to five years in prison if found guilty.

While the trial doesn’t directly deal with the attacks themselves, it is important for survivors and families of victims who are seeking justice.

Of the nine men who directly carried out the Paris attacks, seven died at the scene. The two surviving killers fled and hid in the squat Bendaoud rented to them in the town of Saint-Denis north of Paris, and then died during a violent several-hour-long police assault on Nov. 18, 2015.

Bendaoud won immediate, though involuntary, fame all over France when he gave a surprising TV interview during the police operation on the apartment. He approached the security perimeter set up around the besieged building and spoke to journalists to clumsily proclaim his innocence.

“I wasn’t aware they were terrorists. I was asked to do service, I did service, sir,” he told a reporter from BFMTV channel.

“I was told to put up two people for three days, I helped out normally,” he explained, before being interrupted by a police officer who came to arrest him in front of the live camera.

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Samuel Petrequin in Paris contributed.