France has found eight people guilty in relation to a July 2016 lorry attack that killed 86 people, including 15 children, in the southern French city of Nice, sentencing the defendants to prison terms ranging from two years to 18 years.
A special court in Paris convicted seven men and one woman, three of whom were convicted of association with a terrorist while the other five were found guilty of supplying weapons. The attacker during the incident, who was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was fatally shot after driving a lorry into crowds of people on Bastille Day.
France's 2016 Lorry Terror Attack Trial
The 31-year-old was a Tunisian who plowed through roughly 30,000 people who were gathered to watch a fireworks display for France's national day on Jul. 14. The suspect reportedly careered through the coastal city's seafront boulevard Promenade des Anglais for more than two kilometers.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel injured hundreds of people at the time and it was considered one of the worst attacks in Europe in recent years. French officials announced the verdicts on Tuesday after a lengthy trial at the special courtroom in the French capital, as per BBC.
French officials handed the heaviest sentences of 18 years of imprisonment to two Tunisian nationals; Mohamed Ghraieb and Chori Chafroud. The two were allegedly friends of the killer but have denied any wrongdoing.
Another defendant, identified as Ramzi Arefa, was sentenced to 12 years in jail for providing weapons to the attacker. The three individuals were found to have received texts and Facebook messages from Lahouaiej-Bouhlel in the run-up to the attack.
According to ABC News, the judge's verdict against the defendants followed three and a half months of sometimes heart-wrenching testimony from survivors of the horrific attack. They described the horrors and carnage that they witnessed on that summer night in 2016 that had a significant impact on their lives.
Horrific Rampage
Prosecutors in the case acknowledged that not all of the defendants found guilty had a clear connection to terrorism or knew that the attacker planned. However, they noted that Ghraieb and Chafroud had "an intense relationship" with the attack.
Ghraieb allegedly knew Lahouaiej-Bouhlel for 15 years and attended the same gym as him and had 1,278 telephone communications with the attack in the span of a year. However, Vincent Brengarth, Ghraieb's lawyer, said that his client was planning on appealing the verdict.
Survivors of the attack reacted positively to the judge's verdict, with Laurence Bray saying they were satisfied to see that two main defendants being sentenced to 18 years in prison. Another survivor, Caroline Villani, said while the sentences would not bring their family back, it was a small victory that felt good.
The 2016 lorry attack came only months after the Islamic State group was involved in a 2015 rampage across Paris that resulted in the death of 130 people. The incident deepened a sense of alarm over the threat of Islamist terrorism in the country that contributed to a series of controversial legal changes that gave French security services more powers, the Washington Post reported.
