A court in Paris sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in prison, who tried to kill two people with a cleaver on September 25, 2020, in front of the former headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. This was reported by the AFP agency, which added that the currently 29-year-old convicted man did not know at the time of his attack that the editorial office of the weekly Charlie Hebdo had moved to a secret location guarded by the police after the Islamist attack in 2015, writes TASR.
The morning before his attack Zahir Mahmoud made a video in which he explained that he was going to “revolt” against the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. On his way from his home in Pantin, in the Paris metropolitan area, Mahmoud stopped at a market where he bought a butcher’s cleaver, a knife and bottles of white alcohol.
On Nicolas Appert Street, where the headquarters of the mentioned weekly used to be, A Pakistani man later attacked a man and a woman who had gone outside to smoke. At the time, both worked for Premieres Lignes, a documentary film production company. The perpetrator, however he mistakenly believed that he was attacking journalists satirical weekly. The victims of the attack suffered serious injuries that took a long time to heal and had consequences for their physical and mental health.
Court in Paris evaluated Mahmoud’s actions as a terrorist act, for which he was sentenced to 30 years in prison and a permanent ban on entering French territory. The convicted person now has ten days to file an appeal.
In his closing speech before the court, Mahmud through an Urdu interpreter he said he had “changed a lot” since the attack and understood that “a mindset of hatred, revenge and anger does no one any good, it only hurts”. He subsequently apologized to the victims of his attack and their families and asked for forgiveness from France as “a country that has always supported him”.
Along with Mahmoud, five of his relatives were tried, some of whom were minors at the time of the attack. The General Prosecutor’s Office emphasized that Zahir Mahmoud could never act without their support.
The court therefore found them guilty of criminal terrorist organization and sentenced them to three to twelve years in prison. With the exception of two of them, all of them will be banned from entering the territory of France after serving their sentence.
Mahmoud wanted revenge for the cartoons published by the weekly Charlie Hebdo five years after how On January 7, 2015, a pair of Islamists broke into the editorial office and opened fire there. She murdered 11 people and also killed a policeman on a nearby street.
