The Prosecutor’s Office of France has claimed Thursday sentences of up to five years in prison against thirteen members of a far-right group known as Barjols who planned attacks against officials, migrants and even the assassination of the president, Emmanuel Macron, in the framework of a process against them for belonging to a terrorist gang.
During the hearing held during the day, the Prosecutor’s Office has indicated that «the threat posed by the suspects was very real» and said that the Barjols were «an incubator of violent action projects by some of its members», as reported by the French newspaper ‘Le Progrès’.
The defendants, members of an ultra-right-wing group, have been appearing for three weeks in a Paris court for their alleged plans to attack Macron in 2018 and carry out violent acts against Muslim migrants and elected officials. Thus, the Prosecutor’s Office has stressed that «it is no more acceptable to meet to talk about killing migrants than it is for jihadists to do so to kill ‘infidels’.»
In this regard, it has emphasized that the groupuscule hatched between April and June 2018 «an improbable project of military coup d’état» which subsequently derived in plans for «a dynamic of violence that was on the rise» until the arrest in Moselle in November 2018 of the four main suspects. The president was then in that department on the occasion of the centenary events of the end of the First World War.
The prosecution has therefore demanded five years in prison against the alleged ringleaders of the group, Mickael Iber and Jean-Pierre Bouyer, for the group’s plans to «stab» the president during the events, although the defendants have argued that it was just words and that they really had no intention of taking action to assassinate Macron.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
