The national anti-terrorism prosecutor's office (Pnat) is calling for a trial at the assizes for the man who had run over soldiers with his car in 2017 in Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine), AFP learned on Thursday from a judicial source.
Read also: From Nice to Levallois-Perret, attacks against "Sentinel" have multiplied since 2015
On August 9, 2003, Hamou Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian, injured six soldiers from Operation Sentinel, three of them seriously, by rushing at them behind the wheel of his BMW in front of their local in Levallois-Perret.
At the end of the manhunt, the vehicle was intercepted a few hours later on the highway to Calais.
Hamou Benlatreche, who was at the wheel, had been seriously wounded by bullets when he refused to comply.
"
The investigations (...) come not only to support the premeditated nature of this attack, but also its terrorist character
", declared the Paris prosecutor François Molins, during a press briefing two weeks after this attack.
According to the magistrate, Hamou Benlatreche had scouted the scene three days before the attack, and the content of his two phones suggested an interest in the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) and inclinations to leave for Syria.
But "
we do not have today elements which allow to affirm that it would have had connections
" with the IS, which claimed several of the attacks of the wave of Islamist attacks which made more than 250 dead in France since January 2015, added the prosecutor.
Six months earlier, another Sentinel patrol had been attacked at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, by a radicalized man armed with machetes.
He had slightly injured a soldier and must be tried in 2021 at the assizes.
Holder of a recent residence permit, Hamou Benlatreche, who lived in Bezons (Val-d'Oise), was previously "
unknown to the specialist services
" and had only been reported in common law cases, without ever being convicted.
During the investigation, this man, the only one indicted in this case, denied having wanted to attack the soldiers, saying that a health problem had prevented him from braking in time, according to close sources. folder.
