A Tunisian man who fatally stabbed three people in a terrorist attack at a church in Nice, almost decapitating one victim, has been sentenced to life imprisonment in France.
Brahim Aouissaoui, 25, had told the special court in Paris he had no recollection of the attack in October 2020. He later admitted he was taking revenge on “you [westerners] who kill Muslims every day”.
Armed with a kitchen knife, Aouissaoui almost decapitated 60-year-old Nadine Devillers, stabbed Barereto Silva, a 44-year-old Franco-Brazilian care worker, and slit the throat of Vincent Loqués, a 55-year-old church worker, at the Notre-Dame basilica.
He was convicted of the three murders and six attempted murders.
On Wednesday the court made the rare decision to give him the maximum sentence of life imprisonment with almost no chance of parole for the attack described in the trial as one of “unusual savagery”.
The presiding judge, Christophe Petiteau, described the murders as “very violent” and said the sentence reflected the judges’ verdict that Aouissaoui presented a “too high risk” of reoffending.
Petiteau described Brahim Aouissaoui as “an extremely dangerous man” whose “intention to kill could not be disputed”. His actions could not be described as being the result of a spontaneous “mad act”, the judges added.
The investigating magistrate said Aouissaoui had described France as “a country of miscreants and dogs” and said he was determined to “sow terror”.
The court was told that Aouissaoui had dropped out of school in Turkey at the age of 13 and was drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis at the time. He was radicalised at the end of 2018.
In a closing address to the special court, the counsel for the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office said Aouissaoui was “locked into his totalitarian and barbaric fanaticism”. He added: “The attack was in reality the culmination of a jihadist commitment born in Tunisia.”
It took seven police officers to arrest Aouissaoui, who was shot several times. Afterwards, officers said he was carrying a copy of the Qur’an, three knives and two mobile phones.
According to the anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office there were “many indications that at the time he left Tunisia … the accused intended to carry out an attack in France”.
A national day of mourning was held for the three victims. The killings came two weeks after the history-geography teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded near his secondary school north-west of Paris by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee angered at reports he had shown pupils caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in a lesson on freedom of speech.
Aouissaoui had crossed the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Italy a month before the attack and then entered France overland.
