French jihadist gets eight years behind bars

Paris

A French court yesterday sentenced a 60-year-old man to eight years behind bars for fighting alongside an Al-Qaeda group in Mali.

The Paris criminal court handed down the sentence to Gilles Le Guen -- the first conviction under a law passed at the end of 2012 allowing authorities to prosecute those suspected of waging Jihad abroad.

Le Guen was accused of taking part in the assault by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) on the town of Diabali in January 2013.

The former member of the French merchant navy was arrested by special forces in late April 2013. At the time, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian described him as a “drop-out who became a terrorist”. In October 2012, Le Guen appeared in traditional Muslim robes with a gun at his side in a video on a Mauritanian website in which he warned France, the United States and the United Nations against military intervention in Mali to drive Islamists from the country’s arid north.

France went on to launch and lead an operation to halt an advance by extremists on Bamako and drive them from Mali’s northern cities, which they had controlled for about nine months.