An eighth French national has been condemned to death in Iraq for joining the Islamic State terrorist group, after a court rejected claims he was tortured into confessing.
Fodil Tahar Aouidate, 32, first appeared in court on May 27 but a judge delayed his trial to allow for a medical examination to be conducted.
“The medical report shows that there are no signs of torture on his body,” the judge told the court.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty under Iraqi law for anyone joining a terrorist group — even those who did not take up arms.
Aouidate first went to Syria in 2013 and returned in 2014 with 22 members of his family to join Islamic State, according to the French judiciary.
Authorities also linked him to Belgium’s Salafist movement including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the presumed mastermind of the 2015 Paris Bataclan attacks.
The court heard he was seen in a video posted by Islamic State shortly after the attacks. In the video, Aouidate said it was his “great pleasure and joy to see these unbelievers suffer as we suffer here.”
His conviction comes in the same week that a succession of other French terrorists received the same penalty, as Breitbart News reported.
Iraq has taken custody of thousands of jihadists repatriated in recent months from neighbouring Syria, where they were caught by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces during the battle to destroy the IS “caliphate”.
In 2015 one report by the French senate revealed 47 percent of all known jihadists in what was then Islamic State territory were French citizens, with national intelligence networks having to keep tabs on up to 3,000 individuals at any one time.
Iraqi courts have since placed on trial hundreds of foreigners, condemning many to life in prison and others to death, although no foreign IS members have yet been executed.
No date has yet been for the execution by hanging of the French terrorists.
AFP contributed to this report
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.