A Paris court sentenced a Pakistani man to 30 years in prison on Thursday for a 2020 knife attack outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices.

The court found Zaheer Mahmood, 29, guilty of attempted murder and terrorism in an Islamist-motivated attack in September 2020, which left two people injured.

Mahmood believed he was attacking employees of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, not realizing that the satirical magazine had relocated after Islamists gunned down 12 of the magazine’s staff, including several of France’s most famous cartoonists, in January 2015.

Attack after Charlie republished cartoons of Prophet Mohammed

The knife attack came five years after the Al-Qaeda-linked attack on Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices. 

The Islamist attack was in response to the magazine publishing cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

The 2015 attack, which sparked a global debate over free speech and religious tolerance, forced the magazine to relocate.  

Charlie Hebdo republished its cartoons of Prophet Muhammad on September 2, 2020, to coincide with the opening of the trial for the 2015 massacre.

Attacker radicalized in France after leaving Pakistan

In the 2020 attack, Mahmood wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency with a butcher’s cleaver, mistaking them for Charlie Hebdo staff.

According to his lawyer, Mahmood, a Pakistani national who entered France illegally in 2019, was radicalized by an extremist preacher who had urged his followers to “avenge the Prophet.”

According to his lawyer, Mahmood’s actions stemmed from the disconnect he felt in France after leaving Pakistan. 

“In his head he had never left Pakistan,” Mahmood’s defense lawyer Alberic de Gayardon said on Wednesday. “He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis.”

Five other Pakistani men, some minors at the time, also faced trial for aiding Mahmood, receiving sentences of 3 to 12 years. 

ss/lo (AFP, dpa)