A French court on Wednesday sentenced Tunisian national Brahim Aouissaoui to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the brutal murder of three individuals in a church in Nice in 2020, AFP reported.
Aouissaoui, 25, admitted his role in the October 29, 2020, attack but claimed he could not recall the details of the assault. The incident is among a series of violent acts in France attributed to Islamist extremists since 2015.
According to prosecutors, Aouissaoui, armed with a kitchen knife, nearly decapitated 60-year-old Nadine Vincent, fatally stabbed 44-year-old Franco-Brazilian Simone Barreto Silva approximately 25 times, and slit the throat of 55-year-old sacristan Vincent Loques, a father of two daughters.
The sentence aligns with the prosecution’s request for a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the harshest penalty allowed under French law.
Aouissaoui claimed that his actions were “legitimate” retribution for the West’s alleged killing of "innocent" Muslims.
Earlier in the day, a prosecutor stated that the defendant was driven by “jihadist ideology.”
Aouissaoui was severely injured when police shot him following the attack. He had previously claimed to remember nothing of the events, but medical tests showed no brain damage, and a psychiatric evaluation concluded that his judgment was intact at the time.
The 2020 Nice attack was the third in France in a matter of several weeks. On October 16 of that year, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by a Chechen man in a suburb of Paris after showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a class on freedom of speech.
A month earlier, a 25-year-old man wounded two people in a meat cleaver attack in Paris. He was subsequently charged with "attempted murder with relation to a terrorist enterprise."
France has been on high alert in the wake of terrorist attacks in recent years. The country was first hit by a series of Islamist attacks starting in January 2015, with the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris.
In November of that year, 130 people were killed in a series of jihadist attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS).