Poisoning halal food or "killing 200 radicalized imams"... The anti-terrorist prosecutor's office has requested a trial before the criminal court for thirteen men and three women suspected of having prepared, more or less successfully, violent actions targeting Muslims in France.
In its requisitions dating from Tuesday, May 30, which AFP has seen, the Pnat proposes a reclassification of the facts, initially considered criminal, as criminal facts, which incurs a shorter sentence.
Poisoning halal food
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Despite the seriousness of the proposed projects", the Pnat explained to AFP that it had requested this trial in correctional after having applied its "usual criminal policy (...) when violent action projects are not fully finalized". The final decision rests with an anti-terrorist investigating judge seized of the case. These sixteen members of the clandestine group Action des forces opérationnelle (AFO) are mainly suspected of terrorist criminal association.
They are accused of having, to varying degrees, searched for weapons, planned to use the women of the group, concealed under niqabs, to poison halal food in supermarkets with a rat poison component... Among the many targets mentioned, in projects sometimes barely declarative: "kill 200 radicalized imams", target the rapper Medina or the preacher Tariq Ramadan. In a document, the Ile-de-France cell of AFO, particularly active, "clearly evoked the storming of a mosque" of Clichy-la-Garenne (Hauts-de-Seine) "whose door was to "explode" and which could be surrounded by "long-distance shooters"", details the public prosecutor.
Military past
Many of the respondents, aged between 37 and 74, have a military background or have described an attraction to the military. Depending on the current or past professions declined by these people, we find an antique dealer, a night teleoperator with G7 taxis, a human resources consultant, a diplomat posted at the France embassy in El Salvador, a restaurateur, a craftsman, an accountant, an unemployed person, a high school teacher... Firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition had been found during searches, including components used in the manufacture of TATP explosives. The most radical members of AFO acted under pseudonyms: Phoenix, Attila, Flamme or Richelieu for the alleged leader of the group, Guy S., 69 years old, retired from the national police.
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The defendants have "widely denied having personally intended to carry out violent actions," notes the Pnat. They described AFO as a club of "training in survivalism, at most as a patriotic structure intended to come to the support of the forces of law and order in case of disintegration of society". But for the anti-terrorist prosecutor's office, this "structured, hierarchical, clandestine group" had for "real purposes (...) to prepare its members for confrontation with a community of Arab-Muslim origin conceived as an enemy involving the survival of the culture and integrity of the French population, and on the other hand to prepare terrorist attacks against symbols or members of this population". The Pnat affiliates this group to the thesis of the "great replacement" and places it in the accelerationist tendency, which aims to "precipitate a clash between communities", in this case the Muslims, "designated as targets".
The investigation was able to progress thanks to an undercover agent who participated in several preparatory meetings. Asked by AFP, several lawyers for the defendants did not wish to react. The prosecution has requested a separate guilty plea for a 17th defendant. Several groups affiliated with the ultra-right have been tried recently in Paris: nearly a dozen people affiliated with the group Organization of Social Armies, including its main figure Logan Nisin, were sentenced at the end of 2021 to sentences of up to nine years in prison. Regarding the Barjols, suspected of having fomented a plan to assassinate Emmanuel Macron in 2018, nine of the thirteen defendants were released in February in Paris. An appeal trial is scheduled. An anti-terrorist investigation is still underway concerning another group, Honor and Nation, around conspiracy theorist Rémy Daillet. Finally, four men belonging to the neo-Nazi movement will be tried in June by the special juvenile assize court in Paris, a first.
