‘I have been a terrorist and I will never be able to go for it. I have no day, not a single hour, no act. ” One more chance to show my side, one more chance to shock, Mehdi Nemmouche (39) must have thought when he was allowed to speak for the last time on Friday morning in the Paris Judicial Room where he was on trial for torturing and holding prisoners of the Islamic State terror group in Syria in 2013 and 2014.
Nemmouche tells How he came to his actions. That he decided to become a terrorist when George W. Bush said after the 9/11 attacks in 2001: “Or you belong to us, or the terrorists.” In his eyes, that is “a small player is compared to the US.” That “the Syrian people is freed from the dictatorship thanks to terrorism.” In this twisted reality, Nemmouche is not a sadist, but a hero. “I will never be a defeated man.”
Reports or not, Nemmouche must spend the rest of his life behind bars. On Friday evening, the judge sentenced him to a lifelong imprisonment for hostage, holding and torturing different Western hostages. This is on top of the lifelong punishment that he received in 2019 for the shooting of four people in the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014. Four co -suspects (of whom two are absent and probably dead) were also sentenced to serious prison sentences. Nemmouche listened to the verdict on Friday.
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Recognized by prisoners
The Nemmouche from Roubaix, who ended up in crime, radicalized in prison and joined Syria in the early 2013 in the northern French Roubaix was, according to the court, in a prison of the Islamic State. He ‘worked’ in torture rooms in the cellars of a hospital in Aleppo, where between 2012 and 2014 25 Western journalists and humanitarian employees were detained. Sixteen survived, the rest were executed – videos of the decapitation of, among others, the American James Foley went the world over.
When Nemmouche came into the media in 2014 after the four-fold murder in Brussels, former prisoner and journalist Nicolas Hénin called the authorities because he recognized him from Aleppo. Three other French former prisoners and journalists then also recognized him, especially by his voice and his “obsession” with French chansons that he sang in the IS Martel rooms. Nemmouche is said to have beaten his prisoners with clubs, shattered their fingers, have distributed electric shocks and have pretended to execute them (Nemmouche denies having committed these actions and says the journalists do not know).
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The public prosecutor called Nemmouche earlier this week “the face of jihadist barbarity.” He pointed out that Nemmouche and his co -suspects misunderstand themselves as freedom fighters. Western hostages were usually kept alive for longer to put pressure on Western governments while Syrians were randomly “brutally mistreated and executed”. “It shows how little respect they showed to protect the Syrian population they pretended.”