The Algerian Saber Lahmar, detained for eight years in Guantanamo, cleared then welcomed in France in 2009, and from 2010 in Gironde, will be tried from Tuesday to Friday in Paris for suspicions of radical preaching and incitement to leave for Iraq or Syria of aspirants to jihad.
At the helm of the 16th chamber of the Paris Criminal Court, he will be accompanied by another defendant, Mohamed H., with whom he will be tried for criminal association of terrorist criminals. But the one whose story echoes that of thirty years of globalized jihadism, “always present where radical Islam has been”, according to a magistrate, should attract attention.
Born in May 1969 in Algeria, Saber Lahmar completed a degree in Islamic sciences and, according to justice, became a member of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). He then left for a few years to complete his studies in Medina, Saudi Arabia, before appearing in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1996 and 2001, where he worked in particular in a large mosque in Sarajevo considered a gathering place for Islamists.
The Bosnians handed him over to the Americans in early 2002 with five other Algerians, suspected of having fomented an attack against the United States Embassy. He was transferred to the military prison of Guantanamo, on the island of Cuba, where he was detained until 2008, before being cleared by American justice.
President Nicolas Sarkozy accepts the principle of welcoming two ex-convicts from the camp to France. They will be Lakhdar Boumediene and Saber Lahmar, who sets foot in France on December 1, 2009.”Guantanamo will stay with me until the end of my life. It wasn’t normal torture and it wasn’t eight days“, he will tell in 2012 to AFP.
French justice then took over to establish its hexagonal history from 2010. For the prosecution, the one who seems to act as a “religious guide” quickly officiates as imam of the mosque of Saint-André de Cubzac (Gironde) but also in a clandestine prayer room located above the restaurant of Mohamed H., the other implicated.
Saber Lahmar is criticized for his “rooting in radical Islam” with “very violent remarks” during sermons “attacking Jews, calling for the killing of apostates and for martyrdom”. He is suspected of having maintained links with several jihadist figures in France, including Lionel Dumont, a former Islamist robber of the “Roubaix gang”, or Mohamed Achamlane, leader of the Islamist group Forsane Alizza.
Starting point of the investigation, Saber Lahmar would have “directly encouraged and prepared departures” in the summer of 2015 “towards the Iraqi-Syrian zone”, perhaps against remuneration from the Sanabil association, dissolved at the end of 2016 by the authorities. French who considered it to be at the heart of the jihadist nebula.
Among the travelers, Othman Yekhlef, considered “dead in the area” since the end of 2015, as well as a couple and their four children. The father, Salim Machou, is one of the seven French people sentenced to death in 2019 by Iraqi justice for their membership of the Islamic State group.
“We have no evidence in this file that could show that Saber Lahmar would have caused two people to leave.” in the Iraqi-Syrian zone, challenged Me Christian Blazy, his Bordeaux lawyer with Me Alix Villanove. The one who was indicted and imprisoned in June 2017 and who will appear detained “is the victim of his reputation as a former Guantanamo detainee but (…) after eight years of detention”.
He was released without any fact being legally reproached to him.
A trial is also ordered for the one whom justice considers to be the “second of “sheikh” Lahmar”, Mohamed H., born in Morocco in 1977. His profile appeared in the press in 2017 when he had briefly officiated as an external speaker in English in a college in Côte-d’Or before being dismissed when his indictment was announced. “My client strongly disputes the charges against him“, indicated his lawyer Me Noémie Saidi-Cottier.
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