On July 14, 2016, an assassin drove a truck through a crowd, killing 86 people. The man is shot dead by the police. A Paris court has now found eight of his helpers guilty. You must be in prison for a long time.
In the terrorism trial for the truck attack in Nice that killed 86 people in 2016, two friends of the perpetrator who was shot by the police were each sentenced to 18 years in prison. “You supported the perpetrator morally and materially,” said the presiding judge in Paris. The court also sentenced the man who got the gun used in the attack to the gunman to 12 years in prison. The other five suspects, who were also involved in procuring a weapon, are said to have been in prison for between two and eight years.
On July 14, 2016, the French national holiday, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a heavy truck into a crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. He also shot people. Ultimately, there were 86 fatalities, including two students and a teacher from Berlin. More than 200 people were injured. The perpetrator was shot dead after the crime.
The terrorist militia Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack. According to the public prosecutor’s office, this alleged confession was pure opportunism, despite the perpetrator’s radicalization, and that there was no connection to IS.
Since September, a special court in Paris has been examining the attack in Nice. More than 2000 relatives and victims acted as joint plaintiffs. For four weeks they reported in court about their memories of the attack and the traces that the act of terrorism left on them. Although the assassin was killed by the police at the time, the preparation of his crime and his attitude were an essential part of the process.
Prosecutors concluded that the man had much more than just curiosity about ISIS. He had watched numerous videos of the terrorist militia being beheaded and conducted intensive – at some point daily – research on what was happening in Syria and Iraq, on calls to terror, on IS and al-Qaeda, as well as on the stimulant Captagon, which is considered a “jihadist drug”. “The perpetrator very clearly wanted to give (the attack) a jihadist dimension,” the prosecution said in closing.
The mother of the killed teacher from Berlin reacted with disappointment to the verdicts. “I would have liked harsher penalties,” Barbara Bielfeldt told AFP in Paris. The process stirred up memories of the bad time after the attack when she was looking for her 29-year-old daughter in Nice. “You can’t forget that,” she said. Even after three months of the process, questions remained unanswered, she still didn’t know exactly how her daughter died.
The lawyer Alexandre de Brossin de Méré, who represented the mother of one of the killed schoolgirls from Berlin, was satisfied with the verdict. “It corresponds to the result of the three-month negotiations,” she said. “The court did not allow any excuses. The proximity of the accused to the perpetrator and his plans have been documented and evaluated with the verdict,” she said. The public prosecutor’s office had demanded only 15 years in prison for the two main accused.
