Prisoner Behind France’s First Jihadist Prison Attack Stripped of Nationality

A journalist looks at a cell door at the Sante prison in Paris on Sept. 10, 2014. Joel Saget /AFP via Getty Images

A prisoner who committed France’s first prison jihadist terror attack has been stripped of his French nationality.

The decision to revoke Bilal Taghi’s citizenship was published in the Official Journal of the French Republic on Aug. 7.

According to a joint article by Le Parisien and AFP, Taghi, who was born in Morocco, was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2019 for attempting to assassinate two guards in France’s first jihadist attack in prison, in Osny prison near Paris.

ISIS

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point provided more details in a 2020 report about Taghi’s attack, noting that he was 24 years old at the time of the incident and had sharpened the hinge of his cell window into a sharp object.

Taghi stated that he had intended to kill representatives of the French government for the ISIS terrorist group, highlighting the terrorism dimension of the 2016 incident.

He had been jailed the year before due to an unsuccessful attempt to travel to Syria to join the terror group.

Le Parisien and AFP reported that the attack led to changes in how radicalized inmates are managed in prisons, as it was carried out in the very heart of a dedicated counter-extremism wing that was piloting the segregation of offenders who were known to be radicalized but who were also assessed to not present the highest security risk.

The country has established six Radicalization Assessment Units across France.

Terrorism

France has stripped others of their nationalities over terrorism offenses.

Unzîle Sert, a 26-year-old French-Turkish woman, became the first woman to be stripped of her French nationality last year.

Le Monde reported that her case was the 31st example in 20 years.

Sert was sentenced in November 2017 to five years in prison for an attack plot that was foiled in March 2016. She was arrested while traveling to Paris with three teenage girls to “do better than the Bataclan” at the Casino de Paris, another famous concert hall. The Bataclan theater was targeted in 2015 as part of a series of terror attacks that killed more than 100 people.

The Council of State said that such measures deprive people of their civil and political rights in France but do not prohibit them from actually living in the country.