PARIS:
A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in prison for trying to murder two people outside Charlie Hebdo’s former office in 2020 with a meat cleaver.
When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood mistakenly believed that the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which ten years ago was exposed to blasphemous caricatures by Islamists.
The newspaper had indeed moved in the wake of the storming of its offices by two Al-Qaeda-linked masked gunmen, who killed 12 people, including eight of the paper’s editorial staff.
Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived illegally in France in the summer of 2019. The court had 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 convicted of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy and banned from ever setting foot on French soil again.
On September 25, 2020, around At 11:40 (1040 GMT), Mahmood arrived in front of Charlie Hebdo’s former address.
Armed with a butcher knife, he then proceeded to seriously injure two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency.
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time, were indicted along with Mahmood on terrorism charges for aiding and abetting his actions.
The French capital’s special court for minors handed Mahmood’s co-defendants sentences of between three and 12 years, as well as a ban from French soil for those who were adults.
All were registered on the French terrorist list. None of the six in the dock reacted to the verdict.
Both victims were present at the sentencing, but did not want to comment on the outcome of the trial.
