Nine years in prison for the founder of the ultra-right group OAS

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French justice on Tuesday sentenced the young founder of a tiny ultra-right group inspired by the OAS to nine years in prison for plans for terrorist attacks. Five other defendants, aged 23 to 33, were found guilty of “terrorist association”. The act of the group, arrested in 2017, was “imminent”, according to the court.

The Paris court sentenced, Tuesday, October 12, Logan Nisin, the founder of the ultra-right group OAS, to nine years of imprisonment with continued detention, during the first trial for ultra-right terrorism tried in France since 2017.

The prosecution had requested ten years’ imprisonment against the man, now 25 years old.

“Even if the quantum of the sentence remains in my opinion very high”, Logan Nisin, who has already spent nearly four years in pre-trial detention, “can hope for a conditional release soon,” his lawyer told AFP. , Éric Bourlion.

Behind the windows of the defendants, the condemned man, wisely combed his hair and dressed in a shirt, was seized with tics at the announcement of the judgment, blinking his eyes frantically.

A project modeled on the structure of the 1961 OAS

On Tuesday, the court also found guilty of “terrorist association” five other defendants, aged 23 to 33 years, including a sentence of seven years imprisonment with warrant for Thomas Annequin, number two of the small group Organization of social armies.

“Far from a fantasized political project”, the “new OAS” was conceived by “copying the structure of 1961 Secret Army Organization“, a politico-military group responsible for a bloody repression in the 1960s against the independence of Algeria, said the president of the chamber when reading his judgment.

In this file, “everything attests to the imminence of the passage to the act”, “the OAS was created as a defense army ready, if necessary, to destabilize the institutions”, “to fracture the social body” , continued the magistrate, recalling his “calls for rebellion”, his “incitement to kill” or his corporate racketeering projects to finance weapons.

Logan Nisin was arrested in June 2017, the authorities worrying about his activity on Facebook where he animated a group of “supporters” of Anders Behring Breivik, neo-Nazi author of the killing which killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.

They wanted “to start ‘remigration’ based on terror”, by attacking Muslims, Arabs, black people … or even Christophe Castaner, then spokesperson for the Macronist government, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader leader of rebellious France.

Throughout the two weeks of the trial, the members of the group claimed to regret hate speech, assuring that they would never have taken action, repeatedly referring the responsibility to the founder to Logan Nisin.

Seven investigations into ultra-right attack projects

“Their personal responsibility cannot be diluted in a disembodied global strategy: they have all, and collectively, embodied the OAS”, ruled the court, recognizing them all guilty.

The decision of the 16e Paris correctional chamber was eagerly awaited: the OAS case is the first to be tried out of the seven investigations opened by the anti-terrorism prosecution since 2017 concerning plans for ultra-right attacks.

In her indictment, the prosecutor urged the court to render an exemplary judgment to counter the “exceptional rise in power of the threat brought by the ultra-right movement”.

Since 2017, 48 people have been indicted by the anti-terrorism prosecution in plans for attacks attributed to the ultra-right. Terrorism that the prosecutor compared to Islamist terrorism, describing “two sides of the same fanatic coin”.

With AFP