Rédaction Africa Links 24 with L’Opinion avec AFP
Published on 2024-03-30 23:02:00
A Moroccan man convicted in 2007 for terrorism and stripped of French nationality, Rachid Aït El Hadj, has been deported from France to Morocco, announced French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on X. Rachid Aït El Hadj had been sentenced, along with four other men (three Franco-Moroccans and one Franco-Turk), to eight years in prison for his “participation in a criminal association with the aim of preparing a terrorist act.” The five men were being judged for their more or less direct links with members of a jihadist group responsible for the attacks in Casablanca (Morocco) on May 16, 2003. Forty-five people were killed, including three French citizens, and around a hundred people were injured in multiple attacks on a restaurant, a hotel, and the premises of a Jewish association. They were released between 2009 and 2011. However, Rachid Aït El Hadj continued to worry the authorities upon his release, being suspected of maintaining links with the perpetrator of the foiled attack in 2015 against a church in Villejuif, near Paris, Sid Ahmed Ghlam. The five men were stripped of French nationality in 2015 by decrees published in the Official Journal, at the request of the then Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, despite an appeal to the Council of State. The supreme jurisdiction considered “that due to the nature and seriousness of the terrorist acts committed,” “the sanction of nationality deprivation was not disproportionate” and that “in each case, the behavior of the individual after the acts did not allow for questioning this assessment.”
Read the original article(French) on L’Opinion
