Pakistani national Zaheer Mahmood was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy by a court in Paris.
A Pakistani man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison by a Paris court for a knife attack on two people outside the former offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2020.
The court on Thursday found Zaheer Mahmood, 29, guilty of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy for the attack in September 2020, which injured the two victims.
Mahmood — who arrived from Pakistan illegally in 2019 — will be banned from France once his sentence is completed.
The court heard that when Mahmood stabbed two people taking a cigarette break outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices, he was unaware that the magazine had relocated after the deadly Islamist assault on its newsroom in January 2015 that stunned France.
The attack by two al-Qaeda linked gunmen with assault rifles killed 12 people, including eight of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, was in retaliation for the magazine’s irreverent caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. The attackers were shot dead by police.
The killings sparked fierce global debates about the limits of free expression, and in the days that followed, millions of people marched in solidarity with the magazine, brandishing pens and signs declaring “Je Suis Charlie (I am Charlie)”.
Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time of the attack, were on trial alongside Mahmood on terrorist conspiracy charges for aiding his actions. They were handed sentences ranging from three to 12 years by the Paris court on Thursday.
Controversy over drawings of Prophet Mohammed
Mahmood had been influenced by the hardline Pakistani cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi — who founded the Islamist Tehrik-i-Labaik Pakistan party — the court head. The party backs Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, that carry a death sentence for insulting Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.
Rizvi, who died of cardiac arrest in November 2020, had led a protest march that month to the capital, Islamabad, against Charlie Hebdo’s decision to republish its cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad to mark the opening of the trial for the 2015 massacre.
During police interrogations, Mahmood said those drawings had “fuelled his anger”, the court heard.
“I’m going to go and revolt against that,” Mahmood said in a video shared on social media on the morning of the attack in September 2020.
Mahmood’s lawyer Alberic de Gayardon said he had been radicalised by Rizvi and felt a disconnect in France after leaving Pakistan.
“In his head he had never left Pakistan,” the lawyer said on Wednesday, while admitting that “each of his blows aimed to kill”.
“He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis,” Gayardon added.
In December 2020, a Paris court found 14 people guilty of acting as accomplices in a series of Islamist militant attacks in the French capital in January 2015, including on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
While critics of Charlie Hebdo say it goes too far and that its cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad are Islamophobic, the magazine has defended itself by saying it mocks all religions and maintains a pro-free speech and anti-establishment stance.
In a special 32-page edition released earlier this month, Charlie Hebdo commemorated the 2015 massacre with a cover depicting a man sitting on the butt of an AK-47 rifle and the word “Indestructible!”.
“Satire has a virtue which has helped us through these tragic years: optimism. If you feel like laughing, you feel like living. Laughter, irony and caricature are expressions of optimism”, Charlie Hebdo’s director and cartoonist Laurent Sourisseau said this month.
“Whatever happens, dramatic or happy, the desire to laugh will never disappear,” added Sourisseau, also known as “Riss”, who is a survivor of the 2015 attacks.
