21-year-old Leila was planning to kill the congregation of a church in Béziers with a sabre on Easter Sunday when she was arrested. She is on trial in Paris for terrorist criminal organisation in preparation of several crimes. She faces a sentence of ten years in prison.
A dump littered with rubbish bags, graffiti on the walls, crockery full of maggots and excrement on the floor. This is what the police officers from the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI) and the Raid discovered when they arrested Leila B. in her flat in the Devèze district of Béziers on April 4, 2021.
At the time, the investigators were convinced that they had foiled an imminent attack. The then 18-year-old, completely introverted young woman spent her days in her room, whose walls were papered with photos of the decapitated body of Samuel Paty and the Colombine rampage, watching beheading videos and making homemade acid-based bombs.
On websites such as “tiresurtoutlemondesuicidetoi”, “antinoirs” and “tueursdejuifs”, she discusses her plans for an attack with other internet users.
After contemplating a terrorist attack on a church in Montpellier, she withdrew to Béziers due to health restrictions and difficulties in travelling. There, she planned to kill the worshippers of the Notre-Dame de la Réconciliation church in the Devèze neighbourhood near her home with a sabre.
Everything is recorded in her diary, ” her ever-increasing desire to go out into the street and slit the throat of the first passer-by, drag his body into the woods and smash his skull with an iron bar or a hammer and then return to find someone else “I’ve learnt to slit throats, so there probably won’t be any difficulties,” the young woman continues. Alongside these texts, she draws guns, knives, plans for making explosives, swastikas and sketches of a Daech executioner holding a decapitated head.
Her arrest in April 2021 put an end to her deadly plans. She was charged before the Paris Criminal Court with “terrorist criminal organisation for the preparation of multiple crimes” and faces up to ten years in prison.