Far-left radicals in France have crowdfunded thousands of euros to pay the court costs of seven far-left militants who were arrested in December and have been charged with plotting a terrorist attack.
The money was raised on the website “CotizUp”, a French web platform that allows users to raise funds for various causes. The far-left militants, who advertised their campaign as directly helping those arrested in December, raised nearly €2,500 within 20 days.
“The scarecrow of the anti-terrorism allows the violent division of social movements, isolating one of its components and equating it with atrocities,” the “December 8 defendants’ support committee” group wrote in their message for their campaign on CotizUp, Valeurs Actuelles reports.
According to the far-left activists, those facing trial for allegedly plotting terrorism against police and soldiers “advocated for a world free of the systems of domination that poison our environments,” adding: “It is the ordinary terrorism of patriarchy, racism and capitalism that terrorizes us all and we must continue to denounce and attack it.”
The arrests of the seven far-left extremists came in December. They saw arrests taking place in several parts of France by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), France’s internal intelligence agency.
The leader of the group was identified as 36-year-old Florian D., a militant who had previously travelled to Syria to fight alongside Kurdish forces against the Islamic State before returning to France in 2018.
In 2018, Antifa militants in northern Syria had made threats toward the French state following the evacuation of several anarchist-aligned squats.
The seven members of the network were charged with plotting to kill police officers and French soldiers.
The arrests came just months after a pair of far-left anarchist militants were arrested for plotting an attack on police officers. Both leftists are said to have been armed with guns and both had previous criminal records.
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