#verdict #Paris #attacker #stands #appeal #lodged
The sole surviving member of an Islamic State group that killed 130 people in Paris in 2015 has not appealed his life sentence for the killings, the Paris Attorney General said on Tuesday.
Salah Abdeslam, a 32-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, was arrested alive by police four months after the bloodbath at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere, the worst peacetime atrocity in modern French history.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with only a tiny chance of parole after 30 years, the harshest sentence under French law, which had only been handed down four times since the law came into force in 1994.
The 19 others convicted for their role before and after the attacks also declined to appeal, prosecutor Remy Heitz told AFP.
They had 10 days to appeal after their conviction, a deadline that expired at midnight Monday.
The decision of the special court handling the cases “now has permanent status and there will be no appeal,” he said.
The trial was the largest in modern French history, the culmination of a six-year international investigation whose findings span more than a million pages.
All of the attackers except Abdeslam blew themselves up or were killed by police during or after the attack.
Abdeslam began his court hearings last September by defiantly declaring himself an “Islamic State fighter,” but ended up tearfully apologizing to the victims and asking for leniency.
In his final statement, he asked the judges not to give him a life sentence because he had not actually killed anyone.
“I made mistakes, that’s true. But I’m not a killer, I’m not a killer,” he said.
– “Not out of fear” –
Abdeslam, a former weed smoker who loved to party, removed his suicide belt on the night of the attack and fled back to his hometown of Brussels, where many of the extremists lived.
He told the court that he had had a change of heart and decided not to kill people.
“I changed my mind out of humanity, not fear,” he insisted.
But after hearing that his suicide belt was found to be defective, the judges concluded that it cast “serious doubts” about his apparent “waiver.”
They ruled that he was an “accomplice” in the attacks, which “constituted a single crime scene.”
A team of 10 jihadists besieged the French capital and attacked the national sports stadium, bars and the Bataclan in an attack immediately claimed by the IS group from Syria.
The attacks shocked France with the choice of targets and the nature of the violence apparently aimed at creating maximum fear, just 10 months after a separate attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine.
In one case, the court heard a recording of gunmen taunting people trapped in the Bataclan as they fired at them with Kalashnikov machine guns from a balcony above them.
France, under then-President Francois Hollande, declared the country “at war” with the extremists and their self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
Hollande, testifying in November, called the trial “extraordinary” and “exemplary,” adding that the defendant was “judged with respect for the law.”
The 10-month process “enabled us to search for the truth to better understand the course of Islamist terrorism,” he said.
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