Algeria | 38 sentenced to the death penalty will have sentences commuted to life

On Monday, October 23, the Algiers Court of Appeal sentenced thirty-eight people to the death penalty for the lynching to death of a man wrongly mistaken for an arsonist after helping to put out deadly fires during the summer 2021, according to the official Algérie Presse Service (APS) agency.

These sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment because a moratorium on the application of the death penalty has been in force in Algeria since 1993.

The lynching, which took place in the region of Kabylie (north-west), had raised a wave of indignation throughout the country.

Of the ninety-four people tried in this case, in addition to the thirty-eight death sentences, the court acquitted twenty-seven people and sentenced the others to sentences ranging from three to twenty years in prison, according to APS.

Those sentenced to death were notably found guilty of“terrorist and subversive acts having undermined state security, national unity and the stability of institutions; of participation in intentional homicide with premeditation; of conspiracy ».

At first instance, in November 2022, forty-nine people were sentenced to the death penalty, seven acquitted and the others received sentences of two and ten years in prison.

“Let crime not go unpunished”

In less than a week, in August 2021, fires killed ninety people in Kabylia and ravaged thousands of hectares.

After hearing that he was suspected of having started a fire, a 38-year-old painter, Djamel Bensmaïl, who had come to help the villagers put out the flames, voluntarily presented himself to the police to provide explanations for his presence on places.

Images relayed by social networks showed a crowd surrounding the police van and extracting the man from the vehicle.

Mr. Bensmaïl had been beaten and then burned alive, and young people had taken selfies in front of his corpse.

The images of the lynching then went viral, commented on in particular via the hashtag #justicepourdjamelbensmail.

The perpetrators of the selfies tried to cover their tracks but Internet users across the country compiled videos and took screenshots so that the crime did not go unpunished.

Source: Agence France-Presse, Staff, October 23, 2023

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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