France Expels Islamist Djamel Beghal To Algeria

Algerian Islamist Djamel Beghal, considered as the mentor of two of the perpetrators of the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris, was expelled to his native country after his release from a French prison on Monday morning, AFP learned from corroborating sources.

Djamel Beghal, aged 52, stripped of French nationality, had left the prison of Vezin-le-Coquet, in the west of France, “at around 05:30 a.m (03:30 GMT), to be deported to the border” according to a trade union source, and took off shortly after 10:30 a.m from the Parisian airport of Roissy towards Algiers, indicated sources close to the file.

“He was released this morning at 5:20 a.m, and forwarded into custody by the police border. He behaved calmly and was not surprised at the time of his departure,” the prison’s administration told AFP.

In the sights of the French authorities since the mid-1990s, Djamel Beghal was declared deportable in 2007, two years after being sentenced to 10 years in prison for terrorist criminal association.

In Vezin-le-Coquet, in Brittany, he was completing his second ten-year prison sentence for the 2010 escape of Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, a former member of the armed terrorist group (GIA) who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1995 terror attack on the RER station at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The French authorities, who wanted Beghal to return to Algeria, the country he left at the age of 21, had been discussing the conditions of his deportation to Algeria with Algiers for several weeks.