Paris: A prominent French terrorist found guilty of terrorist offences connected to Syria received a 14-year prison sentence from a Paris appeals court on Friday.
The court was more lenient in ruling that Kevin Guiavarch will not spend the majority of the term behind bars, upholding the sentence imposed against him by a lower court.
Salma O., his wife, was given a six-year prison term, which she can complete at home while wearing an electronic bracelet due to her "rehabilitation efforts."
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Before the court adjourned to deliberate, Salma 0 pleaded with the justices, "Give me back the chance you gave me by allowing me to return to work and my job as a mother." The appeal was made because the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) thought the sentences imposed were insufficient.
Guiavarch, however, was described by the prosecutor general as "neither a fanatic nor a lunatic. Guiavarch, a 30-year-old Muslim convert, was listed on a blacklist as one of the UN's most wanted terrorists in 2014.
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Guiavarch was friends with some of the perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks while residing in Raqqa, the de facto capital of IS, and is suspected of being one of the key Daesh group recruiters luring young French people to join the terrorist cause in Syria and Iraq.
The former church choirboy, who was brought up in Brittany by a single mother, asserted that he had "reformed. He spent four years in Syria working with terrorists, first with the Fateh Al-Sham Front, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, and then with IS.
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In June 2016, he left Syria and travelled to Turkiye, where his extended polygamous family and he were all detained.The next year, he was transferred to France.