The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office had requested life imprisonment. Two cousins, Sami and Aymen Balbali, were sentenced on Friday June 24 to 25 and 30 years’ imprisonment respectively for having organized and perpetrated a failed attack on a residential building in the 16th arrondissement of Paris in the fall of 2017. .
The specially composed Paris Assize Court matched this sentence with a two-thirds security period for the two men: Aymen, 34, from a suburban district of Brétigny-sur-Orge and on file S for his radicalization , and Sami, 37, manager of a delivery company. For the latter, of Tunisian nationality, the court pronounced a definitive ban on residence on French territory.
In the middle of the night of September 30, 2017, when several attacks had targeted symbolic places in the capital in the previous months, a homemade incendiary device had been placed in one of the halls at 31 rue Chanez, in the west of Paris. The four gas canisters and liters of gasoline could have blown away the twenty homes and their occupants. The plan failed despite nine firing attempts.
The court ruled that this planned attack had been organized by the two cousins, whose DNA was found on the spot.
During the trial, which began on June 7, Aymen Balbali, a corpulent former taxi driver and targeted by wiretapping by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), asserted a right to silence with variable geometry. Dodging a number of questions, including those on the choice of the target, he however assured that he had not adhered to radical terrorist Islam, despite the numerous documents relating to the jihadist group Islamic State found in his belongings.
Regarding Sami Balbali, against whom weighed much less incriminating evidence, the court considered that he had played a “secondary role”.