Ultra-Right Supporter Sentenced to Five Years in Prison for Planning Violent Action

At the end of an extended hearing, the chamber specializing in terrorism cases also imposed two years of socio-judicial monitoring and ineligibility for 25 years on Alexandre E., a 20-year-old Mosellan.

Monitored by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) for his exchanges on Telegram, Alexandre E. was arrested near Metz in September 2022 and placed in pre-trial detention, shortly after the report of a military friend.

The latter, who seemed to share the same political ideas, was worried after the disappearance in his regiment of an HK416 assault rifle, even though he knew of Alexandre E.’s fascination with weapons.

According to this soldier, the defendant regularly expressed his desire to commit violent action, at times mentioning an attack on an LGBT+ pride march, at others a mosque.

The investigation also did not make it possible to establish a specific project that Alexandre E. would have fomented, but the court considered that his desire to take action was clear.

In addition to frequenting neo-Nazi Telegram channels, he learned about the manufacture of explosives, even acquiring equipment and carrying out tests, while making extremely violent comments.

In a fit of anger, he told his father-in-law that he wanted to “blow up a synagogue” and, on social networks, said he wanted to “plunge the Jewish Republic of France into the flames of hell” or “build a new Reich”.

During the hearing, Alexandre E., born in Moscow to a Russian mother and a Moroccan father whom he knew little before arriving in France at the age of six, admitted to having had these racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacists, paying lip service to it, but assured that he had “never had any malicious intent”.

“I am passionate about weapons, technology and engineering,” he said to justify his failed attempts to buy weapons, his tests of explosives being just “intellectual stimulation”.

The prosecutor had requested eight years of imprisonment against Alexandre E, seeing in him “intelligence put at the service of evildoing”.

“His dangerousness remains significant,” said the magistrate, regretting his “lack of sincere regret and questioning” in the face of a “deep and long-standing anchoring in the nauseating far-right ideology”.

His lawyer, Ms. Olivia Ronen, had pleaded for acquittal, considering that the planned attack for which Alexandre E. was being tried was only supported by the testimony of his military friend, whose statements were sometimes confusing.