There were five of them, they were between 14 and 22 years old and they were part of a group called Waffenkraft (“the power of weapons” in German) in which they discussed neo-Nazi ideology, praised Hitler or Mussolini and talked about how to make explosives. Alexandre Gilet was the ringleader, the “most motivated radical” of all. He was an assistant gendarme. He wanted revenge for the 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris, especially the one in the Bataclan theater, which left 130 dead on November 13. That was the year of his radicalization. “We have to do worse,” he had told his friends.
This Monday the trial against four of these young neo-Nazis begins in Paris, the first trial for ultra-right terrorism to be tried in a criminal court in France, since other previous trials (including a plan to assassinate the president, Emmanuel Macron) were in correctional courts. The four young people who sit on the bench are charged with the crime of terrorist criminal association. Now they are between 22 and 28 years old. The fifth, who was a minor, has already been sentenced by a juvenile court.
According to the investigators, between 2017 and 2018 these young people planned attacks with various objectives, such as the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF, in its French acronym) or the anti-racism league. Also a rally by the leader of La Francia Insumisa, the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or a concert by the rapper Médine, from the left and whom the right and extreme right associate with Islamism.
In 2018, the Police arrested Gilet, then a gendarme assistant, after a complaint for having placed an order for products for the production of explosives. Considered the leader of the group, the young man (then he was 22 years old) had Anders Breivik as his idol, the perpetrator of the attacks in Norway in 2011 in which 70 people died. In the search of his house, the Police found two Kalashnikovs, ammunition and products for the manufacture of devices, as well as explanatory videos.
In addition, on his computer there were searches on what the investigators believe were objectives and a kind of manifesto to take action. A decalogue of terror that his lawyer, Fanny Vial, has defined more as “an intimate diary of hate that he now regrets”, she told the AFP agency.
Investigators believe that it was inspired by jihadist attacks, with similar modus operandi, such as the suicide truck attack on the Nice promenade in 2016 in which 86 people died. Gilet was getting his license to drive heavy vehicles.
The profiles of the defendants and their process of radicalization is disturbing, especially the attraction that this type of attack aroused in them. Except for one, who came from a more stable and wealthy background, all come from broken families, with troubled childhoods and previous problems. Instead of seeing each other to plan parties or outings, or to study, they met to practice shooting in the middle of the forest.
The one who creates his group’s logo, a black sun with three swastikas, was 17 at the time and had spent time at a center for troubled youth. During interrogations he has confessed to being anti-Jewish. The oldest of the group, 23 years old at the time, had already been sentenced for spreading pornographic images of a minor. Although all have acknowledged sympathy with the ideas, they assure that at no time did they really think about taking action.
The threat from the extreme right is worrying to the point that the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, decided to ban the demonstrations of these groups. A decision that the judge annulled. In recent years, several processes have been opened in relation to this ideology in the anti-terrorist center of Paris. Just this weekend, five young people linked to the extreme right were arrested in Rouen by the police after causing riots outside a festival where rapper Médine was performing.
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