He could have killed "blindly and indifferently all the passengers".
The Thalys gunman, Ayoub El Khazzani, was sentenced, Thursday, December 17, to life imprisonment by the special assize court of Paris for the foiled attack on the Amsterdam-Paris train in August 2015.
Three men accused of aiding the shooter and his sponsor Abdelhamid Abaaoud, also coordinator of the November 13 attacks, were sentenced to terms ranging from seven to twenty-seven years in prison.
Three hundred ammunition
On August 21, 2015, El Khazzani boarded the train at Brussels station armed with a Kalashnikov, a pistol, a cutter and 300 ammunition.
It had been overpowered by passengers, including two American soldiers on vacation and in civilian clothes.
They had thrown themselves on him, thus avoiding that he does not kill "blindly and indifferently all the passengers", recalled in its decision the court, which followed the requisitions of the attorneys general.
When the verdict was announced, Ayoub El Khazzani, 31, with a checkered shirt and black hair tied in a small bun, remained upright in the box, without showing any emotion.
He would have committed "a indiscriminate attack" which would have been "particularly deadly" without "a combination of particularly improbable circumstances" - defective ammunition - and "the exceptional courage of the passengers", declared President Franck Zientara.
"I am sorry from the bottom of my heart"
Throughout the trial, El Khazzani had maintained that he had received the sole mission of his sponsor to kill American soldiers and members of the European Commission, who would be present on board the train, according to Abaaoud.
The court recalled that the Americans wore "no distinctive sign" and that El Khazzani had boarded the train equipped "with a real arsenal", "likely to cause multiple victims".
Its goal was to kill "blindly and indifferently" the 200 or so passengers on the train, the president said.
The shooter's co-accused, Bilal Chatra, Redouane El Amrani Ezzerrfi and Mohamed Bakkali were found guilty of helping El Khazzani and Abaaoud on their journey to Europe from Syria.
They were sentenced to 27, 7 and 25 years respectively.
The president also recalled that the failed attack was part of "a real campaign of mass attacks which culminated" in the attacks of November 13 in Paris and March 2016 in Brussels.
Before the court withdrew to deliberate Thursday morning, El Khazzani apologized at length to the victims.
"I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart," he said, his voice choked with sobs.
With AFP
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