Highlights: Trèbes and Carcassonne trials: verdicts more lenient than the indictments. In 2018, Radouane Lakdim shot dead four people in a parking lot and in a supermarket in the south of France. Among them, gendarme Arnaud Beltrame who had exchanged places with a hostage of the terrorist in the supermarket. A majority were prosecuted for “terrorist criminal conspiracy’ and up to eleven years in prison were required. But the sentences ultimately handed down are much lower.

In 2018, Radouane Lakdim shot dead four people in a parking lot and in a supermarket in the south of France, in the towns of Trèbes and Carcassonne. Among them, gendarme Arnaud Beltrame who had…

Trèbes and Carcassonne trials: verdicts more lenient than the indictments

In 2018, Radouane Lakdim shot dead four people in a parking lot and in a supermarket in the south of France, in the towns of Trèbes and Carcassonne.

Among them, gendarme Arnaud Beltrame who had exchanged places with a hostage of the terrorist in the supermarket.

Six years after the events, the trial of seven accused, close to the terrorist, ended Friday evening in Paris.

A majority were prosecuted for “terrorist criminal conspiracy” and up to eleven years in prison were required.

But the sentences ultimately handed down are much lower

Entrance of the courtroom during the opening of the trial of the Trèbes-Carcassonne attacks at the Palais de Justice in Paris on January 22, 2024. Six men and a woman are on trial for “terrorist criminal association” linked to the attacks of Trèbes and Carcassonne of March 23, 2018, which left four dead including gendarme Arnaud Beltrame, who lost his life while taking the place of a hostage.

AFP - BERTRAND GUAY

By: RFI Follow

From six months to four years in prison.

So why such a discrepancy with the requisitions?

Of the five defendants tried before the Paris Special Assize Court for “criminal terrorist association”, four were acquitted for this offense, and only convicted for related offenses.

Read alsoFrance: opening of the trial of the assassinations of Trèbes and Carcassonne in 2018

The most telling case is that of Samir Manaa,

one of the seven accused

He is the best friend of the terrorist Radouane Lakdim.

He had accompanied him to buy a hunting knife in a fishing store.

Knife which will be used two weeks later to

slit the throat of Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame

Like his co-defendants, he was certainly aware of his friend's radicalization, but was not aware of his planned attack.

The Court therefore did not accept “terrorist criminal association” and considered that the investigation had gone too far in the definition of this offense.

Samir Manaa received three years in prison for a simple offense, possession of weapons, unrelated to the attack.

Only Marine Pequignot, the radicalized girlfriend of the attacker who killed four people on March 23, 2018 before being shot dead in the attack by the police, was found guilty of this offense.

The young woman, now 24 years old, at the time ultra-radicalized and who knew "almost" everything about her boyfriend's attack plan according to the prosecution, was sentenced to five years of imprisonment, two of which years suspended.

She will not return to prison and the sentence is much lower than that requested by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) in its requisitions: eleven years.

These verdicts are a setback for the prosecution and arouse incomprehension among the civil parties.

It is also a blow to the qualification of “terrorist criminal association” and its extensive, not to say abusive, use.

The President of the Court explains this.

“

If there is no material act, we cannot hold this offense.
In the absence of criminal responsibility, the accused have a great moral responsibility.
I leave them to their conscience

…”

On the morning of March 23, 2018, Radouane Lakdim, a 25-year-old small-time drug dealer, very radicalized and monitored for this, went to a homosexual meeting place.

He shoots two men, one dies.

He continues his journey in a supermarket in Trèbes, a neighboring town in the southwest of France.

There, he killed the 50-year-old head butcher of the supermarket and a customer, each with a bullet to the head.

He shouts “

Allah Akbar!”

», insults people between the shelves, brandishes his revolver, then he takes an employee hostage and orders her to call the gendarmerie, presenting himself as a “

brigadier of the Islamic State

” and evoking the bombings of France in Syria .

After an hour, Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, 44, convinced the jihadist to take him hostage instead of the agent.

Radouane Lakdim will be killed in the assault.

Arnaud Beltrame, seriously injured with a knife in the neck by the assailant, died in hospital.

Trèbes and Carcassonne trials: verdicts more lenient than the indictments

Trèbes and Carcassonne trials: verdicts more lenient than the indictments

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