France: Tunisian Islamist trained for jihad and took part in throat-slitting lessons

He took part in a lesson on slitting throats. Twice he has tried to leave for an area where the Islamic State group is in power. He is in possession of firearms and regularly attends a shooting range. These are some of the things for which a radicalised Franco-Tunisian, who was expelled from Switzerland in 2017 and has been on trial in Paris since Monday, RTS reports.

The Petit-Saconnex mosque also appears to have been a rallying point. The members of this jihadist network never met at the same time. The courts suspect that they exchanged a lot of information via an encrypted messaging system and talked about Islam, armed jihad and routes to Syria. The judiciary lists physical training in the mountains and target practice at the shooting range as other activities.

The investigations conducted by Switzerland and France eventually lasted four to five years. Last June, two Swiss members of the group were sentenced to prison terms of between one and two and a half years, including a suspended sentence.

The sentence handed down by the Paris Criminal Court on Thursday, seven years in prison, was significantly harsher than that of the Franco-Tunisian expelled from Switzerland in 2017, who was considered by the judges to be one of the stalwarts of the jihadist network. Another member, an Italo-Tunisian living in neighbouring France, was sentenced to 6 years in prison.

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