The American State Department, who added his name to its list of “foreign terrorist fighters,” described as “an extremist French-based Syria , a member of organization Islamic State, which conducts executions on behalf of the group. ” The image is contrary to that outlined by those who knew Benghalem Salim, 34. “A Muslim” party pursue “an ideal of justice” in Syria, yes. But “certainly not an executioner.”
His family preferred to describe a happy boy, “little runt”, fourth in a family of seven children in a small house located in Cachan (Val-de-Marne), with that “he got along well.”
In 2012, Salim Benghalem yet the leaves suddenly, without warning, leaving there as a woman and two young children. He waited four days to contact his family, to whom he appears to have joined the IU Syria. News, via Skype or Viber, are regular, say relatives: every ten or fifteen days, he calls from Internet cafes near Aleppo. Sometimes pass behind him armed fighters. With other jihadists, he happens to speak French.
“There is no place in France. He found there a” warrant of anonymity a member of his entourage. This place, according to him, would “impose fines” on behalf of the organization “for illegal possession of cigarettes, or things like that.” “But this is not an executioner!” he insists.
It is not the first sudden departure
The last family contact takes place in August, still Aleppo, under bombardment: it then with a small beard.
Salim Benghalem is not his first sudden departure. In 2001, he had been to Algeria, the country of origin of his family, to escape justice on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, amid settlement of accounts between rival gangs. For a year, he exchanges already with loved calling himself “Dahleb” (the name of a former Algerian footballer PSG), then returned “voluntarily” in 2002 and was arrested.
After five years in custody, he was sentenced in 2007 to eleven years’ imprisonment. But thanks to “good behavior” and “repentance”, it benefits shortly after a regime of parole and a parole, before being finally free in 2010, details his counsel for the time, Leon Lef Forster me.
Contacted by AFP, the latter said he was “stunned” by evolution. “It was a non-practicing Muslim, simply doing Ramadan, without excessive religiosity,” he says. “The person we are talking about today is not the young man that I knew.” One of his childhood friends went on: “It was a very funny guy, very playful He liked to joke and had the joy of living.”. “And it was not someone especially brave. When there was an altercation, he was not first in line.”
Nightlife, girls and alcohol
young man called “stub” by his friends because of a crooked incisor, stopped his studies and did not finish his CAP sales alternately. It connects the odd jobs: supermarket cashier, electrician, canteen supervisor …
His free time is made of “spell, with all that implies: girls some alcohol, but for him especially shit “blows his childhood friend.
” When I saw him after his release from prison, I felt mature “, but nothing that suggests any radicalization, he develops. “I do not think anyone can explain what happened.”
In France, the name of Salim Benghalem appeared in a terrorism investigation that led to the dismantling of a jihadist die
November 2013 in the Val-de-Marne, according to a source familiar with the matter. He was then already
Syria.
There, he would “actively participated in combat” and “would have volunteered there for about a year a suicide operation,” the source said.
Without denying his dangerousness, another source, however, about “the particular
focus” placed on him by Washington: “It is certainly a boy radicalized, that could be dangerous, experienced But as services. him, there are others. ”
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