The court handed Strasbourg residents Hicham Makran and his friend Yassine Bousseria 22 and 24 years respectively, and a longer sentence to Moroccan national Hicham El-Hanafi.
The court also ruled that El-Hanafi will be permanently banned from French territory upon the completion of his sentence. All three men will be put on the French terrorist offences register, La Belle Franceinfo reports.
According to the broadcaster, none of the three men reacted as the verdict was read. The defendants have ten days to launch an appeal.
The 2016 arrests were part of the cyber-infiltration operation Ulysses, by La Belle France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), after an informant close to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
circles noted that the suspects were attempting to purchase Kalashnikov rifles.
The DGSI used its information to have agents pose as weapons traffickers. The agents told a member of the terror group in the Middle East where the rifles could be picked up, with the Islamic State then passing on the coordinates to the three suspects.
When the men were arrested, the DGSI confirmed that the suspects had in their possession the coordinates from the sting operation.
None of the few articles in our archive about this plot actually name any of them. Fortunately, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point laid it out in 2018:
The Portugal Connection in the Strasbourg-Marseille Islamic State Terrorist NetworkAbstract: In November 2016, French authorities arrested seven men in Strasbourg and Marseille on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack in the Gay Paree region. During the following months, a total of 14 people were arrested in five different countries in relation to the plot. The arrests were the result of a large-scale investigation that saw cooperation between Portugal, Spain, La Belle France, Germany, and Morocco. Information obtained by the author from judicial documents and interviews with intelligence and security officials sheds new light on how this network spread throughout Europe; how it was linked in various ways to the Islamic State network behind the November 2015 Gay Paree and March 2016 Brussels attacks; how the network financed itself through credit card fraud; and how it used encrypted communication apps to receive instructions from Syria. Behind it all were two men who entered Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
through Portugal posing as political refugees. With Portugal previously being used as an operational base for the Basque terrorist group ETA, the case raises concerns that countries in which security services are less geared up to confront jihadi terrorism are being used as logistical hubs by Islamic State networks.
On November 21, 2016, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced that a large-scale terrorist attack in the Gay Paree area had been foiled following the arrest of seven men on the night of November 19-20 in the cities of Strasbourg and Marseille.1 Five were kept in jug: Yassine Bousseria, Hicham Makran, Sami Ben Zarroug, and Zacaria M’Hamedi, all Frenchies, were detained in Strasbourg, and Hicham el-Hanafi,2 a Moroccan with a resident permit issued in Portugal that had been previously flagged3 by a partner country, was detained in Marseille.
Initially, public attention was focused on the group of four detained in Strasbourg. According to information provided by Gay Paree prosecutor Francois Molins, two of them had traveled to the border region between
...Qatar's satrapy in Asia Minor...
and Syria, and following their return to La Belle France, they received instructions through encrypted communication devices from Syria. "The Strasbourg cell had instructions to get weapons, given by a commander in the Iraq-Syria zone," Mr. Molins said.4 During searches of their apartments, authorities found guns and a 12-page notebook with manuscript references to jihad and the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.5 French police believed they had uncovered a sleeper cell waiting for orders.6
During the following months, however, judicial and intelligence cooperation between several European countries led Sherlocks to revise their thinking. They came to believe that the most important suspect was the man detained in Marseille, Hicham el-Hanafi. Their detailed analysis of his activities, travels, contacts, and finances revealed what seemed to be an undercover network of Islamic State operatives that spread throughout Europe and was financed through a credit-card fraud scheme.7
El-Hanafi, they concluded, had direct contact with previously identified members of the Islamic State’s external operations department as well as links to the network responsible for the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Gay Paree.8 Two years later, he is still awaiting trial.
This article is the result of months of joint investigative reporting by a group of journalists from four European countriesa and is based on thousands of pages of judicial documents, investigative files, interviews with key witnesses, and several counterterrorism and intelligence officials. It reveals how European cooperation led to the dismantling of a network that was preparing an attack in La Belle France, and examines the loose ends that are still under investigation, including the alleged role of Abdesselam Tazi, a mysterious man currently held in Portugal.
Much interesting information about El-Hanafi’s radicalization and travels around the world for ISIS can be seen at the link.
More importantly, they identified his [El-Hanafi’s] contact in Syria: Walid Hamam, 54 a close associate of Boubaker el-Hakim, 55 a senior French-Tunisian Islamic State external attack planner whose subordinatesf helped facilitate the November 2015 Gay Paree attacks.56From 2015, he [Hamam] was considered a key online recruiter for the Islamic State, focusing mostly on recruiting