Nadine Osman
Four men from a French neo-Nazi group who plotted attacks on mosques and Jewish targets in an online chat group were sentenced on June 30.
Alexandre Gilet, a former volunteer police officer in the southeastern department of Isere and identified as the ringleader, received a sentence of 18 years, with the Parisian court concluding he had “undeniable influence over the group.”
Gilet, 27, was arrested after police discovered he had ordered explosives-making equipment and owned weapons, including two Kalashnikov machine guns. Before his arrest on September 7, 2018, Gilet wrote a “manifesto,” a phrase used by ultra-right terrorists like Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Oslo and Utøya, Norway, in 2011, and Australian terrorist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who slaughtered 51 Muslim men, women, and children in two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand in 2019.
The other three, one of whom was a minor at the time, were given lighter prison terms ranging from five to three years but are expected to serve non-custodial sentences.
Prosecutors alleged during the trial that the four men, now aged between 22 and 28, joined a private internet chat group called “Operation WaffenKraft,” where talks “very quickly turned to the preparation of terrorist projects.”
The Waffen-SS was the military branch of the Nazis elite SS corps, which was founded by Adolf Hitler. The chat group discussed targets, including mosques as well as the headquarters of the Jewish Council and the office of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism—or Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA).
“I think he [Gilet] wanted to do something worse than the Bataclan,” one of the suspects would later say of Gilet.
He was referring to the November 2015 Muslim attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed, dozens of them at the Bataclan concert venue.
The discovery of training videos and photos led police to four other people taking part in a target practice in a remote forest in July 2018.
They included one youth who was just 14 years old and who has already been given a suspended two-year prison sentence in juvenile court. Lawyers for the four others criticised the decision to hold a public trial.
