A French appeal court has handed prison terms of 10 and 12 years to two close associates of the gunman who killed four people in Carcassonne and Trèbes in 2018, sharply increasing the penalties imposed at their first trial.
The specially composed assize court in Paris, which tries terrorism cases without a jury, sentenced Marine Pequignot, the attacker’s girlfriend at the time, to 10 years on October 7. Samir Manaa, who took Radouane Lakdim to the shop where he bought the hunting knife used in the attack, was given 12 years.
Both were convicted of terrorist criminal conspiracy, the charge at the centre of the appeal. The national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office had asked for 16 years for Pequignot and 20 for Manaa.
At the first trial, which ran from January to February 2024, Pequignot received five years with two suspended and Manaa three years. The terrorist conspiracy count against Manaa was rejected then and he was convicted only of related offences.
The court accepted that Pequignot knew what her boyfriend intended and found that Manaa’s lack of any radical conviction did not absolve him of what he understood when he went with Lakdim to buy the weapon, L’Indépendant reported.
A third defendant, Baghdad Haddaoui, had also appealed against a three-year term with two years suspended for failing to report a terrorist crime. He did not appear before the court, having been removed from French territory.
Lakdim, a 25-year-old French-Moroccan flagged by the security services over suspected radicalisation, shot two men sitting in a car in Carcassonne on March 23, 2018, killing one and seriously wounding the other. He then drove into the city and opened fire on four unarmed police officers who were out running, injuring one of them.
He went on to the Super U supermarket in Trèbes, a few kilometres away, where he shot dead an employee and a customer before taking a checkout worker hostage. In a call to police he claimed the attack for Islamic State and demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving attacker from the November 2015 killings in Paris.
Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame of the gendarmerie took the hostage’s place inside the supermarket and was shot and stabbed. He died of his wounds the following day, and security forces killed Lakdim when they stormed the building.
Fifteen people were injured across the three attacks. The verdict lands as French prosecutors push on with a series of terrorism cases, among them charges brought on October 5 against five people over alleged fundraising for Hamas through a network of charities.
