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The special Paris Assize Court sentenced on Monday night to 25 and 30 years in prison the two main defendants in the trial of the failed attack of Notre-Dame de Paris.
After more than ten hours of deliberations, the special court of assizes rendered its verdict in the trial of the commando of Notre-Dame . She sentenced Ornella Gilligmann and Ines Madani to 25 and 30 years' imprisonment. At the statement of the verdict, the first collapsed in tears behind the box, his head in his hands. The second took a step back. As if she physically cashed the heaviness of the sentence.
The court followed the prosecution's submissions on the length of imprisonment. But not on the security period of two thirds of the sentence claimed by the Advocate General. The two women will be able to apply for parole once half of their detention. Thibault de Montbrial, a lawyer for an association of victims of terrorism, deplores this respite, rarely granted in terrorism cases, and remains convinced of their dangerousness.
Does this absence of a period of security mean that the court believed the remorse expressed by the two women, their promise to be de-radicalized now, and thus leave them with a distant hope for the future? This is in any case what had asked Ornella Gilligmann, mother of three children. This is also what counsel for Inès Madani pleaded in highlighting her youth - 19 years old at the time of the events.
Maître Laurent Pasquet-Marinacce seemed dejected by the verdict, considering the sentence extremely severe. Because despite the seriousness of the facts, there were no dead or wounded, he recalls. For him, the court wanted to make an example. It was the first time that a group of women were tried after a passage to the act. It was also the first case handled by the new national antiterrorist prosecutor's office.
With their three co-defendants, Inès Madani and Ornella Gilligmann have become, in the words of the Advocates General, the " face of female jihad ". Today, aged between 22 and 42, they are suspected of having wanted to launch terrorist attacks following the instructions of Rachid Kassim, propagandist of the Islamic State (IS) group and inspiring a few weeks earlier the assassination of a policeman and his wife in Magnanville (Yvelines).
On the night of September 3 to 4, 2016, they tried to blow up a car filled with gas cylinders, in front of restaurants near Notre-Dame de Paris, trying to burn it with diesel. Only the choice of this fuel, difficult to ignite, prevented the explosion.