(Paris) The Paris Special Assize Court on Thursday sentenced to 18 years in prison the two accused, Tunisian and Franco-Tunisian, tried for their role in the Nice attack, the second deadliest committed in France, which caused 86 deaths on July 14, 2016.
Prosecuted for terrorist conspiracy, Mohamed Ghraieb, a 48-year-old Franco-Tunisian hotel receptionist, and Chokri Chafroud, 44, an undocumented Tunisian migrant, provided “logistical and ideological support” to Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the 31-year-old Tunisian author of the ram truck attack on the Promenade des Anglais on the evening of the national holiday, affirmed the court at the end of its deliberations.
Prosecuted for terrorist conspiracy, they were both sentenced to 18 years of criminal imprisonment during the first trial in December 2022.
While in the first instance the prosecution had requested 15 years of imprisonment against the two men, the attorney general, Naïma Rudloff, this time requested the legal maximum provided for, i.e. 20 years of imprisonment against them.
“Give me a chance,” Mohamed Ghraieb asked before the court retired to deliberate. “I’m not a terrorist. I can be reinstated. I’m not dangerous. I am against any form of violence,” he implored.
His co-accused did not wish to speak.
Believing that the case was based only on “fantasies” and “hypotheses”, the lawyers of the two accused pleaded Tuesday and Wednesday for their acquittal.
The court composed solely of professional magistrates and chaired by Christophe Petiteau, a magistrate accustomed to trials for terrorism – he was notably president of the assize court which judged the Magnanville attack, the assassination of a couple of police officers in their home in June 2016 – is expected to announce his verdict late this afternoon or early evening.
Mohamed Ghraieb and Chokri Chafroud were found guilty of providing “logistical and ideological support” to the author of the Nice attack.
According to the prosecution, which admits that the two accused are neither accomplices nor co-authors of the acts of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, they would nevertheless have been asked by their compatriot to provide him with a weapon and would have been associated with the rental of the truck which was used in the massacre.
During the trial, the two accused repeated that they had not looked for a weapon for Mohamed Lahouaiej – Bouhlel – but Mr. Chafroud gave several versions on the subject – and that they had not been associated with the truck rental.
A few days before the attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had separately invited the two men to get into his truck with him. But it was not a question of carrying out reconnaissance with a view to the attack, the prosecution admitted.
Coming from a rural family in southern Tunisia, Chokri Chafroud left school at the age of 11.
After a first visit to Nice in the summer of 2015 where he met Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel for the first time, he returned to Tunisia at the beginning of 2016, without losing contact with his compatriot, before returning clandestinely to Nice in spring 2016.
Read at the hearing, the messages sent by Chokri Chafroud to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel while he was in Tunisia, frustrated and penniless, are of rare obscenity and often very violent.
Three months before the attack, Chokri Chafroud had written to his friend: “go ahead, load the truck with 2000 tons of iron and fuck it, cut the brakes my dear, and I’ll watch.”
For the prosecution, this type of messages could have inspired Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s modus operandi.
As for Mohamed Ghraieb, the prosecution considers that he could be at the origin of the radicalization of the killer.
In January 2015, three days after the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which left twelve dead, including the economist Bernard Maris and the cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski on January 7, 2015 in Paris, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had wrote on his social networks “Je suis Charlie”. Mohamed Ghraieb replied: “I’m not Charlie […] Did you see how God sent soldiers of Allah to finish them off like sh…! “.
At first instance, Mr. Gharieb denied being the author of these hate messages. On appeal, he admitted having written them. “When I see what I wrote, I’m ashamed,” he said.
