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17 years in prison for a French Moroccan after he was convicted of joining the Islamic State in Libya in 2016, and five years for his partner for participating in a criminal terrorist organization.
The Special Criminal Court, which issued the verdict, attached the sentence of 42-year-old Shuaib Ataf, on Friday 10/3, to a security measure for two-thirds of the sentence and ordered him to be subjected to judicial social follow-up for a period of five years after his release from prison.
Also, his partner, Donia Bentefret, who is forty-one years old and has been under judicial supervision since June 2022, was sentenced to five years in prison, with two of them suspended, and obligated her to undergo social and judicial follow-up for eight years, and to continue the procedures of the “Individual Accompaniment and Social Rehabilitation Program.” To combat extremism in an open environment, the court explained that it “did not want to be re-imprisoned for not endangering the rehabilitation process,” stressing that the decision came “above all in the interest of your two children.”
Shuaib Ataf’s trial began on Monday, March 6, on charges of association with a criminal terrorist organization and due to several attempts to join a recruitment network and areas under the control of the Islamic State organization between 2013 and 2017.
Ataf, who was nicknamed the “jihadi of the keyboard” in his surroundings, had long since joined the jihadist movement and joined the caliphate declared by the Islamic State, and was expelled from Syria in 2014, so he went to Libya, where the terrorist movement intended to expand its territory and took control until December. December 2016 on the coastal city of Sirte in the north of the country and a large part of the eastern coast.
But this “Islamic paradise” turned into “hell”, according to Ataf, as his partner and their two young children remained secretly imprisoned for months in unsanitary places and moved between Derna and Sebha in the northwest of the country in a state of war.
He was arrested in May 2017 with the rest of the family, and they all spent two years in Libyan prisons before being deported in April 2019 to Egypt and then, the following month, to France.
Shoaib Ataf confirmed during the trial that he did not fight and expressed his disappointment with the Islamic State, but stressed that he was still loyal to the idea of the “Islamic State”.
Ataf and his partner were also convicted of evading their legal obligations towards their two children.