July 13 (EUROPA PRESS) –
An Algerian court has issued a new sentence to 20 years in prison against the leader of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), Ferhat Mheni, who has lived in exile in France for years and against whom several life sentences already weigh. .
According to information collected by the Algerian state news agency, APS, Mheni has been sentenced in absentia on charges related to the “creation of a terrorist organization” and being part of it to “act against the security of the State”.
Likewise, Belabaci Brahim, a senior MAK official, has also been sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison, while three other defendants -identified as Ait Chebib Buaziz, Yerid Hamza and Chelbabi Nadir- have been acquitted of the charges they weighed against them.
Mheni heads the MAK, which is seeking independence for the Berber-majority Kabylia region. The group was born during the revolts known as the ‘Black Spring of Kabylia’, between 2001 and 2003, and advocates the holding of a self-determination referendum in this area of the east of the country.
The Algerian government published in 2021 an amendment to the Penal Code to expand the definition of “terrorism” and approved the creation of a list of people and entities considered by the government to be terrorist organizations, in which the group was included.
After that, the Algerian president, Abdelmayid Tebune, demanded that the French authorities arrest and extradite Mheni to Algeria to be tried for the charges against him. For this reason, there is an international arrest warrant against the MAK leader, although he has not yet been arrested.
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.
