November 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –
An Algerian court has sentenced the leader of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), Ferhat Mheni, to life imprisonment for “creating a terrorist organization” and “attacking territorial integrity and national unity”.
The Algiers court has handed down the default sentence against Mheni, who lives abroad, as well as a life sentence against Belabes Brahim, another defendant in the same case, according to the Algerian state news agency, APS. .
Likewise, Lafdhal Zidane and Butegrabet Munir have been sentenced to 20 years in prison by this court, which has issued international arrest warrants against these four people. Mheni has lived in France for years.
The Government of Algeria published in June 2021 an amendment to the Criminal Code to expand the definition of “terrorism” and approved the creation of a list of persons and entities considered by the Government as terrorist organizations, a document in which it was included in May that year the MAK, which seeks the independence of the Kabylia region, with a Berber majority.
Along with the MAK, the oppositionist Rachad was designated as a terrorist, a movement that advocates a peaceful change of regime in the country whose founders include former members of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), of an Islamist nature and dissolved by the authorities in 1992 after the outbreak of the civil war a year earlier.
The conflict, which lasted until 2002 and left more than 150,000 dead, broke out after the government, backed by the army, canceled the parliamentary elections after the FIS’s victory in the first round, due to its refusal to hand over power to some Islamist authorities in the country.
