Seven men and one woman are found guilty over 2016 truck rampage in Nice in which 86 people were killed
- Two men sentenced to 18 years for helping Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel prepare the attack
- Prosecution said Mohamed Ghraieb and Chokri Chafroud had shared ‘an intense relationship’ with Lahouaiej-Bouhlel
- Ramzi Arefa – who admitted to selling the attacker the semi-automatic pistol he fired at police, without hitting anyone – was handed 12-year term
French judges on Tuesday ordered prison terms for eight suspects charged in the 2016 terror attack in Nice, where a suspected Islamist attacker rammed his truck into a night-time crowd celebrating the July 14 national holiday.
Two men were sentenced to 18 years for helping Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian, prepare the attack that killed 86 people and injured over 450.
Judges determined that Mohamed Ghraieb and Chokri Chafroud must have known about the attacker’s turn to Islamist radicalism and his potential to carry out a terror attack, based on records of phone calls and text messages among the three in the days ahead of the massacre.
The prosecution said both had shared ‘an intense relationship’ with Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Ghraieb in particular had known the attacker for 15 years, attended the same gym and shared 1,278 telephone communications with him in one year.
Pictured: Caroline Villani, who lost a child and was injured during the 2016 attack in Nice, on December 13, 2022 as she leaves after the court
In this courtroom sketch suspects from the left, rear, Artan Henaj, Chakri Chafroud, Ramzi Arefa, and below, Mohamed Walid Ghraieb, Endri Elezi, Makzim Celaj and Enkeledka Zace sit in court on the first day of the Nice attack trial in Paris, Monday, September 5, 2022
Ghraieb, a 47-year-old from the same Tunisian town as Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, and Chafroud, a 43-year-old Tunisian, are also accused of helping to rent the delivery truck. They denied the charges.
‘The court is strongly convinced that the author of the attack… was associated as much with Mohamed Ghraieb as with Chokri Chafroud in his determination and in carrying out his criminal act,’ presiding judge Laurent Raviot said.
Ramzi Arefa, 28 – who admitted to selling Lahouaiej-Bouhlel the semi-automatic pistol he fired at police, without hitting anyone – was handed a 12-year term.
But he was not accused of criminal association with a terrorist or of being aware of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s potential for launching an attack.
The Islamic State group later claimed him as one of its followers, though Raviot confirmed that investigators had not found any concrete links between the attacker and the jihadists who at the time controlled swaths of Iraq and Syria.
Pictured: Nadege Renda, injured during the 2016 attack in Nice, addresses the press on December 13, 2022 at the Paris courthouse
The five other suspects, a Tunisian and four Albanians, were sentenced to prison terms of two to eight years on charges of weapons trafficking or criminal conspiracy, but without any terrorism link.
Brahim Tritrou was the only suspect tried in absentia after fleeing judicial supervision to Tunisia, where he is now believed to be under arrest.
The judge’s verdict followed three and a half months of emotional testimony from survivors of the 2016 attack.
Some survivors and members of the victims’ families were able to come to Paris for the proceedings, but many watched on a secured online site or at a special viewing centre set up near the Nice beachfront.
Laurence Bray, one of the attack victims who attended the sentencing, said she was ‘very happy’ that Ghraieb and Chafroud were sentenced to 18 years – more than the 15 years prosecutors had requested.
‘But then again, for everyone who lost a loved one, 18 years is nothing,’ she told AFP.
Pictured: Nadege Renda (left), injured during the 2016 attack in Nice, reacts with relatives on December 13, 2022 at the Paris courthouse after the prison sentences have been handed out
Among the victims, 33 were foreign citizens and 15 were children. More than 2,400 people are civil parties to the trial.
Some 30,000 people had gathered on the Nice seafront to watch a fireworks display celebrating France’s annual Bastille Day holiday on July 14 when Lahouaiej-Bouhlel unleashed his rampage.
He was shot dead by police on the spot after causing devastation on a two-km (1.2 mile) stretch.
According to French and Tunisian press reports, his body was repatriated to Tunisia in 2017 and buried in his hometown of M’saken, south of Tunis. This has never been confirmed by the Tunisian authorities.
Pictured: People gather around flowers and burning candles to pay tribute to victims of the truck attack along the Promenade des Anglais
The attack came just eight months after a deadly Islamist militant assault on the Bataclan music hall in Paris and France’s national stadium.
France has been buffeted by a wave of Islamist terror attacks since the killings at the satirical Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015, often by ‘lone wolf’ attackers acting in the name of IS or other jihadist groups.
In October, a Paris appeals court upheld the life sentence of Ali Riza Polat, accused of helping to find the weapons for the Charlie Hebdo attackers.
The Nice trial took place at the historic Palais de Justice in Paris, in the same purpose-built courtroom that hosted the hearings over the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.
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