A man who rented his flat to Islamic State jihadists will be sentenced on Wednesday in the first trial stemming…
(Photo: IANS)
A man who rented his flat to Islamic State jihadists will be sentenced on Wednesday in the first trial stemming from 2015 Paris attacks that left 130 people dead.
Prosecutors are seeking a four-year jail term for Jawad Bendaoud, though more serious terrorism charges have been dropped after they said there was insufficient evidence that he knew the men were attackers.
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The court has been packed for the first trial connected to France’s worst attacks since World War II, which started days before a separate case in Belgium involving Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the only surviving gunman from the Paris atrocity.
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French media nicknamed Bendaoud the “Daesh landlord”, using another name for IS, after it emerged the attackers’ ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud had holed up for days afterwards in the apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
Bendaoud, a 31-year-old drug dealer, became a national laughing stock after an infamous TV interview in which he insisted that nothing about the men had seemed suspicious.
Abaaoud and an accomplice, Chakib Akrouh, hid out and plotted a fresh attack before they were killed in a dramatic police raid at the apartment on November 18, 2015, five days after the Paris carnage.
Bendaoud has been on trial since January 24 along with another known criminal, Mohamed Soumah, who helped arrange the apartment but also claimed he did not know the men were terror suspects.
Prosecutors last week urged the court to jail both men for four years for criminal conspiracy, less than the maximum six years they faced for criminal and terrorist conspiracy.
But they are seeking a five-year sentence for a third man, Youssef Ait Boulahcen, for failing to alert authorities about a terror plot.
He is “someone who believed completely in the ideology of Islamic State”, the prosecutor said.
Ait Boulahcen is the brother of a woman killed along with the IS jihadists in the dramatic police raid at the apartment.
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