Six men accused of having prepared violent actions inspired by those of the Islamic State group in a butcher’s shop in Brest (Finistère) are being referred to the special juvenile court at the end of 2024.

Six men are being referred to the special juvenile court, Agence France Presse (AFP) learned this Thursday. They are accused of having prepared violent actions inspired by those of the Islamic State group in a Brest butcher’s shop. The investigation began in September 2019 around the situation of Mohamad D., a Palestinian born in 1985 in Syria.

Arriving in France at the end of 2015 as a refugee – he has since lost this status – he regularly visited the “Chez Wahid” butcher’s shop on the outskirts of Brest in 2019. Behind the stall, Wahid B., convicted that year for advocating terrorism for having mimed shooting with an automatic weapon as a police patrol passed after the attacks of November 13, 2015.

His business was suspected of hosting meetings of the local “radical Islamist movement”, according to the indictment order of which AFP became aware this Thursday, with the advantage of “not attracting attention “. The establishment was sounded in November 2019, which allowed investigators to trigger a wave of arrests in January 2020 targeting seven men, ultimately indicted, including Mohamad D. and Wahid B.

Brest naval base considered as target

At the end of three and a half years of investigation, two anti-terrorism judges ordered on July 28 the dismissal of six of them for criminal terrorist association and a dismissal of the case for the seventh. The trial, confirmed by a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal on Monday, could be held at the end of 2024 before the specially composed juvenile court, because one of the accused was 16 years old at the time of the facts.
The six accused, five of whom are still detained, were born between 1983 and 2003 and suspected of having considered several targets for violent actions: the Brest naval base, Chinese New Year celebrations in France, a synagogue, football matches …

“You kill the whole village in one night, it’s easy”

In a sound recording from December 9, 2019, Mohamad D. said to Wahid B.: “We need a little training, we need weapons, and we need to learn certain things (…) We can’t go there. too far away, for example, we go to see the countryside. There are four or five of us, armed, you kill the whole village in a single night, it’s easy (…) You have to have the audacity, and you have everything planned,” adds this man, now 38 years old.

“Out of context” sound recordings, denounces his lawyer, Me Sami Khankan, who tells AFP that he “will plead innocent” as he “contests the procedure in form and substance.” Among the other projects attributed to the six men by investigators, the infiltration of the French army, “you light them all,” suggests the one who was then a minor, or the rallying of fighters in Syria or Mali.

Mohamad D.’s journey seemed to interest his co-defendants. “He fought there and everything,” says one of them. “How did he come back?” asks another. But Mohamad D. contested the numerous elements put forward by the investigators to assert that he had fought in the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria in 2014. His defense presents him as distanced from the rest of the cell and believes that the investigators used its geographical origin, a Syrian area under the yoke of the Islamic State group, to consolidate a file that it considers artificial.

Collective fascination with the abuses perpetrated by jihadists

For the judges, on the contrary, the plans for violent actions are very real. They mention paintball sessions related to shooting training, plans to purchase weapons by certain protagonists, in Brest and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and above all a form of collective fascination with the abuses perpetrated by jihadists.