A French court jailed three men for two to seven years on Tuesday for helping al Qaeda agents who killed Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Masood just before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The main Paris criminal court also jailed two other men for helping recruit Islamic fighters for Afghanistan, handing them sentences of two and five years respectively.
The court jailed Algerian national Abderrahmane Ameuroud and Frenchmen Adel Tebourski and Youssef el Aouni for seven, six and two years respectively for providing logistical assistance to Masood's assassins.
The trio were convicted of providing funds and forged documents to the two Tunisian militants who posed as journalists and died when they detonated a bomb that killed Masood during an interview in Afghanistan two days before the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda targeted Masood because he was a key military and political leader of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition to the fundamentalist Taliban movement that had provided Osama bin Laden's movement with a base in Afghanistan.
I'd rather just kill the lot of them. Will our enemies really quake with fear over two years in a French prison? In five years, they'll be out and then we'll have to kill them.
Well, unless the French trade them for something in the meantime.
Thanks France. Way to be an ally. Two to seven whole years! It just reeks of sophistication and runny cheeses.
