Salah Abdeslam sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment

This is an extremely rare decision in judicial history. Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commandos of the November 13, 2015 attacks, was sentenced to life imprisonment with an incompressible security sentence on Wednesday June 29. This is the heaviest sentence in the Penal Code, pronounced only four times since its introduction in 1994. This real perpetuity makes it impossible to adjust the sentence. The guilt of Salah Abdeslam was retained as co-perpetrator of the facts of murders in connection with a terrorist enterprise.

The court held in particular that the explosive vest he was wearing on the evening of November 13, 2015 was not functional and thus called into question his line of defense according to which he would have voluntarily given up blowing himself up. The terrorist nature of the association of criminals was recognized for all of the 20 defendants, except one, Farid Kharkhach, who received the lightest sentence with two years in prison for having transmitted false papers to the jihadists.