Maya Amimour was accused of having facilitated the departure to Syria of two minors promised to her brother, at the request of the latter. She has always claimed not to know of her brother’s deadly plans.
The sister of Samy Amimour, one of the three assailants of the Bataclan of the attacks of November 13, was sentenced Friday evening in Paris to five years’ imprisonment, three of which were suspended for having facilitated the departure for Syria of two minors promised to his brother, at his request. The criminal court followed the requisitions of the prosecution, and arranged the two-year prison sentence under an electronic bracelet. Maya Amimour, 29, medium-length brown hair, gray suit, appeared free under judicial supervision for participation in a terrorist criminal association and abduction of a minor – one of the teenagers had not joined Syria.
“Absence of radicalization”
She had been arrested and indicted in March 2015 and had immediately admitted the facts. In 2014, she had agreed to help her brother to successively organize the departure of two minors who were promised to her in marriage. Samy Amimour left in September 2013, despite a judicial review, to fight in the ranks of the Islamic State group. The defendant had paid for a plane ticket to Turkey – the gateway to Syria – for a first young girl, a 16-year-old teenager living near Montpellier, whose departure in early August 2014 had been prevented by the police and the teenager’s father.
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Then a few months later, in October, Maya Amimour had helped the departure of another 17-year-old minor, a radicalized high school student from the Paris region. Upon her arrival in Syria, the latter had married Samy Amimour, who a year later would commit a massacre at Bataclan with two other jihadists. The widow of Samy Amimour is part of a group of sixteen women repatriated from Syria to France last July, all indicted and placed in pre-trial detention. Maya Amimour’s lawyers, Alexandre Luc-Walton and Sophie Rey-Gascon, insisted on the “perverse manipulation” of his brother and the“lack of radicalization” of his sister, six years his junior. An absence of radicalization retained by the court.
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