A former master corporal of the Foreign Legion was sentenced on Tuesday to five years' imprisonment, including two years with a probationary suspension, for having participated in 2013 in arms trafficking when he was stationed in Aubagne ( Bouches-du-Rhône).
He was also fined 20,000 euros.
This 37-year-old Romanian, now reconverted in the printing press, was arrested on June 29, 2013 along with two other legionaries.
The three soldiers were preparing to hand over 12 Czech Skorpion machine guns to two clients, men already convicted of narcotics cases.
For several months, investigators had wiretapped some legionaries whose coded exchanges betrayed participation in arms trafficking.
The two clients and seven other former legionaries were sentenced in September to terms of up to three years in prison.
"A central role"
Prosecutor Alice Mazière had requested five years in prison and a warrant of arrest against this defendant who could not be tried with the others but who, in her eyes, would be "the thinker" of this organization where he occupied "a central role. ".
Referring to her missions in Afghanistan, during which her captain had been killed, she called out to him: “You say that it was hot in Afghanistan, that we sometimes come back in the evening less than we left in the morning, but when you put a bag of weapons in anyone's vehicle to earn 200 euros per weapon, where is the awareness?
"
The prosecution compared this sale of remilitarized weapons of war which fire in a burst and the settling of scores committed in recent years in Marseille against a background of drug trafficking.
His sentence can be adjusted
Son of a soldier, this former legionary who had been a non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie in Romania admitted having committed "a serious fault".
But according to his defender Me Fabrice Giletta, he was only a cog, and the lawyer called on the court to "put him in his rightful place, that of an intermediary".
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Having already served nine and a half months of pre-trial detention, his sentence can be adjusted by a sentence enforcement judge, said the president of the court.
