Pak man gets jailed for 30 years for killing two by Paris court

A Pakistani national Zaheer Mahmood was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempted murder and ‘terrorist conspiracy’ by a French court in Paris on Friday (local time), Euro News reported.

Mahmood (29), a Pakistan national, was accused of the knife attack on two people outside the former offices of the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ in 2020, as per Euro News.

Mahmood, who arrived from Pakistan illegally in 2019, will be banned from France once his sentence is completed.

When Mahmood stabbed two people taking a cigarette break outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices, he was unaware that the magazine had relocated after the deadly Islamist assault on its newsroom in January 2015.

The attack by two al-Qaeda-linked gunmen with assault rifles killed 12 people, including eight of Charlie Hebdo’s staff. It was said to be in retaliation for the magazine’s irreverent caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. The attackers were shot dead by police, as reported by Euro News.

The killings sparked fierce global debates about the limits of free expression, and in the following days, millions of people marched in solidarity with the magazine, brandishing pens and signs declaring “Je Suis Charlie (I am Charlie)”.

Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were minors at the time of the attack, were on trial alongside Mahmood on terrorist conspiracy charges for aiding his actions. They were handed sentences ranging from three to 12 years by the Paris court on Thursday.

Mahmood had been influenced by the hardline Pakistani cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi — who founded the Islamist Tehrik-i-Labaik Pakistan party. The party backs Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, that carry a death sentence for insulting Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.

During police interrogations, Mahmood said those drawings had “fuelled his anger”. “I’m going to go and revolt against that,” Mahmood said in a video shared on social media on the morning of the attack in September 2020, as per Euro News.