Paris: Agencies
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced on Saturday that the French authorities had deported a Moroccan citizen to Morocco, after he was convicted of terrorism in 2007 and stripped of his French citizenship.
Dramanan explained, in a post on the “X” platform, that the Moroccan Rachid Ait, who was convicted with 4 others, including three French-Moroccans and a French-Turkish, was deported to 8 years in prison for “belonging to a criminal association with the aim of preparing a terrorist act.”
According to Agence France-Presse, the five men were tried for their direct association to some extent with members of a group responsible for attacks that occurred in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, and they were released between 2009 and 2011.
In those attacks, 45 people were killed, including 3 Frenchmen, and about 100 were wounded in operations that targeted a restaurant, a hotel, and the headquarters of a Jewish association. According to what was reported by the Youm 7 news website in Cairo this morning.
The agency pointed out that Rachid Ait El-Hajj has continued to cause concern to the authorities since his release, as he is suspected of having communicated directly with Sayed Ahmed Gholam, the planner of a foiled attack on a church in the city of Villejuif, near Paris, in 2015.
The five defendants were stripped of French citizenship in 2015 by decrees published in the Official Gazette at the request of then Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, despite a petition submitted to the French Shura Council.
The Supreme Judicial Authority considered that “given the nature and seriousness of the acts committed, the penalty of deprivation of citizenship did not take on a disproportionate character,” and stressed that the behavior of the person concerned at the stage after the acts committed did not allow this assessment to be reconsidered.”