PARIS: A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in jail for attempting to murder two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020 with a meat cleaver.<\/p>\n
When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which was targeted by Islamists a decade ago for publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed.<\/p>\n
In fact, Charlie Hebdo had moved in the wake of the storming of its offices by two Al-Qaeda-linked masked gunmen, who killed 12 people including eight of the paper’s editorial staff.<\/p>\n
The killings in January 2015 shocked France and triggered a fierce debate about freedom of expression and religion, fuelling an outpouring of sympathy in France expressed in a wave of “Je Suis Charlie” (“I Am Charlie”) solidarity.<\/p>\n
Originally from rural Pakistan, Mahmood arrived in France illegally in the summer of 2019.<\/p>\n
The court had earlier heard how Mahmood was influenced by radical Pakistani preacher Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who had called for the beheading of blasphemers.<\/p>\n
Mahmood was convicted of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy and he will be banned from France when his sentence is served.<\/p>\n
The 2015 bloodshed, which included a separate but linked hostage-taking that claimed another four lives at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, marked the start of a dark period for France.<\/p>\n
In the years that followed extremists inspired by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group repeatedly mounted attacks, setting the country on edge and inflaming religious tensions.<\/p>\n
To mark the opening of the trial into the 2015 massacre, Charlie Hebdo republished its cartoons of Mohammed on September 2, 2020.<\/p>\n
Later that month, urged by the extremist preacher to “avenge the Prophet”, \u00a0Mahmood arrived in front of Charlie Hebdo’s former address.<\/p>\n
Armed with a butcher’s cleaver, he gravely wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency.<\/p>\n
Throughout the trial, his defence argued that his actions were the result of a profound disconnect he felt from France, given his upbringing in the fervently Muslim Pakistan countryside.<\/p>\n
“In his head he had never left Pakistan,” Mahmood’s defence lawyer Alberic de Gayardon said on Wednesday, conceding that “each of his blows aimed to kill”.<\/p>\n
“He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis,” Gayardon added.<\/p>\n
Charlie Hebdo’s decision in 2020 to republish the Mohammed lampoons triggered a wave of angry demonstrations in Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death.<\/p>\n
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time, were on trial alongside Mahmood on terrorist conspiracy charges for having supported and encouraged his actions.<\/p>\n
The French capital’s special court for minors handed Mahmood’s co-defendants sentences of between three and 12 years.<\/p>\n
None of the six in the dock reacted to the verdict.<\/p>\n
Both victims were present at the sentencing, but did not wish to comment on the trial’s outcome.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the trial one of the two, alias Paul, told the court of the long rehabilitation he undertook after his near-death experience.<\/p>\n
“It broke something within me,” the 37-year-old said.<\/p>\n
Neither he nor the other victim, named only as Helene, 32, have accepted Mahmood’s pleas for forgiveness.<\/p>\n
Mahmood’s lawyers have yet to indicate whether their client will appeal the verdict.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PARIS: A Paris court on Thursday sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in jail for attempting to murder two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020 with a meat cleaver. When he carried out the attack, 29-year-old Zaheer Mahmood wrongly believed the satirical newspaper was still based in the building, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":63458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[26017,26016],"class_list":["post-63457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-french-magazine-charlie-hebdo","tag-pakistani-man-jailed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63460,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63457\/revisions\/63460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}