AI-Summary – News For Tomorrow
French anti-terrorist prosecutors are investigating Salah Abdeslam, the sole convicted perpetrator of the 2015 Paris attacks, for allegedly smuggling jihadist propaganda into his prison cell via a flash drive. Prison authorities discovered Abdeslam had connected a USB drive to his cell computer multiple times. Analysis revealed the drive contained terrorist propaganda linked to ISIS and al Qaeda. Abdeslam’s former partner admitted to supplying the drive. She and two others have been arrested, with the prosecutor seeking pre-trial detention. Abdeslam is already serving a life sentence for the 2015 attacks that killed 130 people. The investigation coincides with the upcoming tenth anniversary of the attacks.
News summary provided by Gemini AI.
The French prison authority found in January that Abdeslam, who is allowed to have a computer in his cell, had connected it to a USB drive four times in December 2024 and January 2025, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Sign up here.
“Computer analysis revealed the presence of numerous recordings in the form of ‘access paths’ to audio, image, or video files, most of which related to official propaganda from terrorist organisations, such as the Islamic State or al Qaeda,” the statement said.
The suspected offences included having illegal objects in his cell and complicity in criminal association, it added.
His former partner, identified as Maeva B., admitted she bought the drive, loaded it with jihadist propaganda and delivered it to Abdeslam during a prison visit, according to the anti-terrorism prosecutor.
She is also under investigation in the probe and separately on suspicion of “belonging to a terrorism organisation seeking to commit crimes against people,” based on documents seized at her home during police searches.
Her husband, a 20-year-old man, and a 17-year-old woman close to her, were also arrested as part of that second investigation. The prosecutor is asking for the three of them to be held in pre-trial detention.
Reporting by Inti Landauro; editing by Richard Lough and Andrew Heavens
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
