Salah Abdeslam, sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for his role in the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, has not appealed his conviction.
“None of the twenty defendants appealed,” said Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz Tuesday to AFP.
The decision of the special court of Paris “has therefore acquired today a final character and there will be no appeal,” he added.
The deadline for appeal expired Monday at midnight, the same source said, recalling that more than six years after the attacks, and after nearly ten months of trial, justice sentenced Salah Abdeslam to life imprisonment on June 29.
The sentence, the longest in the French penal code, rules out any possibility of release.
In a statement released today, Olivia Ronen and Martin Vettes, Salah Abdeslam’s lawyers, confirmed that “for reasons of his own, Salah Abdeslam has decided not to appeal his sentence.”
“This does not mean that he agrees with the verdict and the resulting sentence of life imprisonment, but that he is resigned to it. His lawyers are bound by his choice. If such a sentence is unacceptable, we respect the decision of the person we are assisting. There is no honor in condemning a defeated man to despair,” they added.
The magistrates had sentenced Salah Abdeslam’s nineteen co-defendants to sentences ranging from two years to life imprisonment, as the six, including five presumed dead, were tried in absentia.
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